4 ms·

The difficulties you mention are entirely related to the operational costs of carrying out the census. I see no justification for the data collection system its

by magila 9y ago

The difficulties you mention are entirely related to the operational costs of carrying out the census. I see no justification for the data collection system itself to cost over $900 million.

DannyBee 9y ago
Err, no. You understand this isn't a dumb mobile app someone types something into with a simple server backend right? It's the system that manages and handles the operational data collection and statistical analysis for the census. It's not a CRUD app bob types something into at the end of the day. It manages the whole effort.
- NeutronBoy 9y ago
  And the cost likely includes wages/costs of people for things like training users on the system, setting up and running a help desk for census staff to call when they're completing the census, costs for managing and running procurement for the different components, etc.
- cmdrfred 9y ago
  You've told us what it isn't, why not tell us what it is. "manages the whole effort" is pretty meaningless, a time sheet application can make that claim.
  - irq 9y ago
    Imagine building software to handle all the HR needs, IT needs, accounting needs, CRM needs, etc, for a 600,000 person company. Assume that this is also going to be the mother of legacy-tech-debt projects, too. Then, add on the feature of ingesting and actually processing and storing the raw census data, too. Then imagine that it's not a company, but a government agency doing that.
    - cmdrfred 9y ago
      >Then imagine that it's not a company, but a government agency doing that. I think that is the key takeaway here.
- magila 9y ago
  I think we all agree that's it's not trivial. What is far less convincing is your case for it costing $900 million. Dispatching people to addresses is not a novel problem, package carriers do it every day. There isn't some massive R&D effort needed here. The tech already exists, the task at hand is merely a matter of application.
  - Declanomous 9y ago
    I know several people who worked for the last census. The issue you run in to is that people don't only live at addresses. For instance, they attempt to count all homeless people. They attempt to count everyone in prison. They try to count every single person in the United States. This is not as easy as you make it sound. For instance, how would you make sure you counted every transient effectively? The way the census solves that problem is to go out and count all of them in a single night. That's a level of accuracy mot people couldn't even begin to plan for. If you tasked FedEx with that problem, they'd probably find all the easy people and then hand off the rest to the USPS like they do for excessively rural customers.
    - magila 9y ago
      Now you're back to harping on operational costs. It doesn't take a $900 million application to assign people areas of a city to canvas.
      - Declanomous 9y ago
        Tracking that you've performed the operations correctly is extremely complex, necessitating an extremely complex application.
        pas 9y ago
        What are you talking about? How is it extremely complex? So far this is a simple "business" program (there's nothing that requires inventing new Computer Science things, or new hardware, or writing a kernel module, or designing for ultra large storage, or ultra low latency, or global consistency), the requirements should be listed by order of importance by the Census stats and ops team, field teams, administrators; then ask a few teams to come up with a high-level sketch; select 3 of the designs, let 3-5 teams prototype and then assign the remaining of the work to the team that was the most competent. It's not a 900 000 000 dollars job. That means you can employ thousands of Google engineers for a year to build it. That's insanely expensive.

by magila 9y ago

The difficulties you mention are entirely related to the operational costs of carrying out the census. I see no justification for the data collection system itself to cost over $900 million.

DannyBee 9y ago

Err, no. You understand this isn't a dumb mobile app someone types something into with a simple server backend right? It's the system that manages and handles the operational data collection and statistical analysis for the census. It's not a CRUD app bob types something into at the end of the day. It manages the whole effort.

NeutronBoy 9y ago
And the cost likely includes wages/costs of people for things like training users on the system, setting up and running a help desk for census staff to call when they're completing the census, costs for managing and running procurement for the different components, etc.
cmdrfred 9y ago
You've told us what it isn't, why not tell us what it is. "manages the whole effort" is pretty meaningless, a time sheet application can make that claim.
- irq 9y ago
  Imagine building software to handle all the HR needs, IT needs, accounting needs, CRM needs, etc, for a 600,000 person company. Assume that this is also going to be the mother of legacy-tech-debt projects, too. Then, add on the feature of ingesting and actually processing and storing the raw census data, too. Then imagine that it's not a company, but a government agency doing that.
  - cmdrfred 9y ago
    >Then imagine that it's not a company, but a government agency doing that. I think that is the key takeaway here.
magila 9y ago
I think we all agree that's it's not trivial. What is far less convincing is your case for it costing $900 million. Dispatching people to addresses is not a novel problem, package carriers do it every day. There isn't some massive R&D effort needed here. The tech already exists, the task at hand is merely a matter of application.
- Declanomous 9y ago
  I know several people who worked for the last census. The issue you run in to is that people don't only live at addresses. For instance, they attempt to count all homeless people. They attempt to count everyone in prison. They try to count every single person in the United States. This is not as easy as you make it sound. For instance, how would you make sure you counted every transient effectively? The way the census solves that problem is to go out and count all of them in a single night. That's a level of accuracy mot people couldn't even begin to plan for. If you tasked FedEx with that problem, they'd probably find all the easy people and then hand off the rest to the USPS like they do for excessively rural customers.
  - magila 9y ago
    Now you're back to harping on operational costs. It doesn't take a $900 million application to assign people areas of a city to canvas.
    - Declanomous 9y ago
      Tracking that you've performed the operations correctly is extremely complex, necessitating an extremely complex application.
      - pas 9y ago
        What are you talking about? How is it extremely complex? So far this is a simple "business" program (there's nothing that requires inventing new Computer Science things, or new hardware, or writing a kernel module, or designing for ultra large storage, or ultra low latency, or global consistency), the requirements should be listed by order of importance by the Census stats and ops team, field teams, administrators; then ask a few teams to come up with a high-level sketch; select 3 of the designs, let 3-5 teams prototype and then assign the remaining of the work to the team that was the most competent. It's not a 900 000 000 dollars job. That means you can employ thousands of Google engineers for a year to build it. That's insanely expensive.