9 ms·

Buying software services from an ideologically driven consulting firm is the mistake here. The DNC is supposed to be completely neutral in this situation, so to

by tempsy 7y ago

Buying software services from an ideologically driven consulting firm is the mistake here. The DNC is supposed to be completely neutral in this situation, so to hire former Clinton tech people is a poor decision.

GVIrish 7y ago
The challenge there is that if you're hiring people who are a venn diagram of developer and politically active/connected, you're always going to be getting people who have some sort of history with candidates. Maybe it's just generally a hand grenade to hire any company that does political IT. Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.
- tempsy 7y ago
  Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? You're paying a contract developer to develop an app that tallys numbers together...I would pick a shop that has experience with security over any political tilt.
  - eropple 7y ago
    > Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking. (These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)
    - tempsy 7y ago
      It's an app that adds numbers together for a few thousand users. Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this. I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.
      - eropple 7y ago
        I agree! I was trying to explain why these shops exist and are used in the general case, while also noting that this was a bad call here. They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.
      - mattrp 7y ago
        There are roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa give or take with one ballot each...any decent 10-key operator could have transcribed the entire caucus result by midnight last night...and they needed an app? I don't care how much they spent on it, $1 was too much.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Because they tend to be motivated I think that's the concern people have about handing over control of anything remotely electoral in nature to them.
  - GVIrish 7y ago
    I would tend to agree. Maybe I'm ignorant of the inner machinations of political campaigns, but it seems like it's not the type of work that requires domain experience to be effective in. But that's what we would think as IT professionals, people in political campaigns may not think that way. And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.
  - _-david-_ 7y ago
    >Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt? Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.
- Miner49er 7y ago
  In 2016 Microsoft created this app. It can just be a tech company, no need to find political technical people. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-years-iowa-caucuses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-...
  - slg 7y ago
    It is interesting to note how that article talks about this app being used by both Democrats and Republicans. That is likely a requirement for any neutral tech company that wants to get into the business. Even that might not be enough to shield the company from employee protests regarding their participation in political causes even indirectly. Remember that employees of nonpartisan businesses are not necessarily nonpartisan themselves.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there. Truly neutral companies are hard to find; most companies of any proven competence have well-known political preferences, and those that don't there is going to be a concern of unknown and hostile-to-the-customer leanings, which you really don't want to discover after they've manifested.
smacktoward 7y ago
The problem is that there are a limited number of people in the world who have experience dealing with the kinds of problems large-scale political enterprises deal with. Many (maybe even most) of those people are going to have gained that experience by working on campaigns. So if you automatically rule out anyone who's ever worked on a campaign, you're ruling out most of the people who would know how to do the things you want to do.
- tempsy 7y ago
  A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. You don't need to hire a developer with political experience so much as security experience. Either way, the app broke, so even a shop with "experience" here completely failed at their job.
  - oasisbob 7y ago
    A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. That is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to a disastrous rollout like this. You're applying a brand-new app and process to help with complex rules changes, and now you have a new organizational problem. As someone who has had skin in the game with keeping political web tools working, this type of thing is terrifying. Nobody should be depending on new, single-use, day-of, tools. You can't test them or train them well enough.
    - runawaybottle 7y ago
      I have to second this. This is real time polling data that has to be counted, most developers have to put a million checks just to make sure they report polling data accurately, forget actually having to count them as actual legal votes that determine real life outcomes (propelling a presidential candidate to the forefront). Yeah, no, keep the junior developers the fuck away from something like this.
- mattrp 7y ago
  How is this "large-scale" -- I think you may be assuming this was a conventional election where everyone has to cast a vote...that's not how it works... n in this case was <2,000... I mean you could have scaled to 2000 with mysql and manage.py runserver...there's no way this issue was about scaling the app...and there's no way they needed an app to begin with.
BryantD 7y ago
The DNC isn't in this picture. The Iowa Democratic Party (and the Nevada Democratic Party) commissioned the app. I don't think the problem is ideology here, I think it's "consulting firm."
- kaibee 7y ago
  The DNC provides funding to both state level parties. I can imagine that they may have had some level of influence over which contractor was picked. What's the point of becoming a party insider if you can't use that to get your company contracts later?
mythrwy 7y ago
Neutrality might not be the only (nor primary) reason to avoid hiring Clinton tech people though!
esoterica 7y ago
This is such a wildly uninformed take. Firstly, Clinton isn’t running this year. Why is hiring people from her campaign “not neutral”? Secondly, every single person in politics has previously worked for a bunch of different campaigns. That’s how political jobs work; campaigns only last a few months so you’re constantly hopping from one role to another. It’s not possible to hire only people who are untainted by prior association with previous campaigns.
Angostura 7y ago
In what way is it ideologically driven? Specifically
aksss 7y ago
> the DNC is supposed to be neutral Remind me how that worked in the last presidential primary.. I appreciate the aspirational “supposed to” comment but they don’t have a good track record of neutrality. As the problems are never dealt with, I’m not sure why expectations would be different.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  True. I remember the scheduling debacle of 2016, the leaked debate material, etc. That was 2016. This year they have just recently changed the debate rules to allow Bloomberg to get in. If I were one of the other candidates, I would be ticked. I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale.
  - taborj 7y ago
    > I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale. And now you see why so many non-Democrats have a fear of them getting elected. If the DNC can't give equal treatment to its own people with whom they disagree, what of the rest of the country for whom they have apparent disdain?

by tempsy 7y ago

GVIrish 7y ago

The challenge there is that if you're hiring people who are a venn diagram of developer and politically active/connected, you're always going to be getting people who have some sort of history with candidates. Maybe it's just generally a hand grenade to hire any company that does political IT. Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there.

tempsy 7y ago
Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? You're paying a contract developer to develop an app that tallys numbers together...I would pick a shop that has experience with security over any political tilt.
- eropple 7y ago
  > Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking. (These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)
  - tempsy 7y ago
    It's an app that adds numbers together for a few thousand users. Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this. I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.
    - eropple 7y ago
      I agree! I was trying to explain why these shops exist and are used in the general case, while also noting that this was a bad call here. They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.
    - mattrp 7y ago
      There are roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa give or take with one ballot each...any decent 10-key operator could have transcribed the entire caucus result by midnight last night...and they needed an app? I don't care how much they spent on it, $1 was too much.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Because they tend to be motivated I think that's the concern people have about handing over control of anything remotely electoral in nature to them.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  I would tend to agree. Maybe I'm ignorant of the inner machinations of political campaigns, but it seems like it's not the type of work that requires domain experience to be effective in. But that's what we would think as IT professionals, people in political campaigns may not think that way. And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.
- _-david-_ 7y ago
  >Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt? Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.
Miner49er 7y ago
In 2016 Microsoft created this app. It can just be a tech company, no need to find political technical people. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-years-iowa-caucuses/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-microsoft-is-changing-this-...
- slg 7y ago
  It is interesting to note how that article talks about this app being used by both Democrats and Republicans. That is likely a requirement for any neutral tech company that wants to get into the business. Even that might not be enough to shield the company from employee protests regarding their participation in political causes even indirectly. Remember that employees of nonpartisan businesses are not necessarily nonpartisan themselves.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Or maybe there's an opportunity for a truly neutral company to make inroads there. Truly neutral companies are hard to find; most companies of any proven competence have well-known political preferences, and those that don't there is going to be a concern of unknown and hostile-to-the-customer leanings, which you really don't want to discover after they've manifested.

smacktoward 7y ago

The problem is that there are a limited number of people in the world who have experience dealing with the kinds of problems large-scale political enterprises deal with. Many (maybe even most) of those people are going to have gained that experience by working on campaigns. So if you automatically rule out anyone who's ever worked on a campaign, you're ruling out most of the people who would know how to do the things you want to do.

tempsy 7y ago
A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. You don't need to hire a developer with political experience so much as security experience. Either way, the app broke, so even a shop with "experience" here completely failed at their job.
- oasisbob 7y ago
  A junior developer could've developed an app to count votes from 1000 precinct reporters. That is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to a disastrous rollout like this. You're applying a brand-new app and process to help with complex rules changes, and now you have a new organizational problem. As someone who has had skin in the game with keeping political web tools working, this type of thing is terrifying. Nobody should be depending on new, single-use, day-of, tools. You can't test them or train them well enough.
  - runawaybottle 7y ago
    I have to second this. This is real time polling data that has to be counted, most developers have to put a million checks just to make sure they report polling data accurately, forget actually having to count them as actual legal votes that determine real life outcomes (propelling a presidential candidate to the forefront). Yeah, no, keep the junior developers the fuck away from something like this.
mattrp 7y ago
How is this "large-scale" -- I think you may be assuming this was a conventional election where everyone has to cast a vote...that's not how it works... n in this case was <2,000... I mean you could have scaled to 2000 with mysql and manage.py runserver...there's no way this issue was about scaling the app...and there's no way they needed an app to begin with.

BryantD 7y ago

The DNC isn't in this picture. The Iowa Democratic Party (and the Nevada Democratic Party) commissioned the app. I don't think the problem is ideology here, I think it's "consulting firm."

kaibee 7y ago
The DNC provides funding to both state level parties. I can imagine that they may have had some level of influence over which contractor was picked. What's the point of becoming a party insider if you can't use that to get your company contracts later?

mythrwy 7y ago

Neutrality might not be the only (nor primary) reason to avoid hiring Clinton tech people though!

esoterica 7y ago

This is such a wildly uninformed take. Firstly, Clinton isn’t running this year. Why is hiring people from her campaign “not neutral”? Secondly, every single person in politics has previously worked for a bunch of different campaigns. That’s how political jobs work; campaigns only last a few months so you’re constantly hopping from one role to another. It’s not possible to hire only people who are untainted by prior association with previous campaigns.

Angostura 7y ago

In what way is it ideologically driven? Specifically

aksss 7y ago

> the DNC is supposed to be neutral Remind me how that worked in the last presidential primary.. I appreciate the aspirational “supposed to” comment but they don’t have a good track record of neutrality. As the problems are never dealt with, I’m not sure why expectations would be different.

RickJWagner 7y ago
True. I remember the scheduling debacle of 2016, the leaked debate material, etc. That was 2016. This year they have just recently changed the debate rules to allow Bloomberg to get in. If I were one of the other candidates, I would be ticked. I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale.
- taborj 7y ago
  > I think the DNC is anything but neutral. They seem to strongly put their thumb on the scale. And now you see why so many non-Democrats have a fear of them getting elected. If the DNC can't give equal treatment to its own people with whom they disagree, what of the rest of the country for whom they have apparent disdain?