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Please educate me on something. I fail to understand why "making custom software for <insert party here>" is something anyone would want to do in the context o

Please educate me on something. I fail to understand why "making custom software for <insert party here>" is something anyone would want to do in the context of owning and growing a real business. This seems fraught with all kinds of issues. First of all (and it seems I've been using this word a lot lately) this turns software development into a religion rather than a business with solid business strategy. The equivalent in other businesses, like the entertainment industry, are people who do work for stars for nothing or nearly nothing because they think it will lead somewhere. All they get is a weird and abusive form of servitude (I've seen this first hand) and no future. Why would someone not write software for politics instead and make part of their value proposition that they are not biased (and, of course, take the steps necessary to actually deliver that). We have a close relative in South America who owns a company that makes and markets voting hardware and software. They are not aligned with any specific political party, movement or cult. They sell to everyone, in and outside South America and have a very nice business.

nooron 7y ago
Hey, I appreciate your comment and I'm happy to share. It is very hard to make into a real business, very few people have succeeded. You do it because you believe in a cause or a candidate or a party. As far as why people don't sell to everyone, the above explains a lot. Another explanation is that political sales (which is different from true election tech, which is purchased by governments) are driven by trust and personal relationships. Once you work for one party in the US, the other will not trust you.
- robomartin 7y ago
  This is interesting and, yes, I do understand. Yet, another take on this is that groups (parties) would then rob themselves from perhaps working with or searching for the most capable of providers. I am not trying to diminish anyone at all, but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers, particularly so if what drives this is passion rather than a skilled software shop that with proven capabilities and experience across a range of relevant domains with an equally proven track record of delivering quality, well tested bug-free product. Of course, the parties would have to we willing to pay more than hobby money for what they need.
  - azernik 7y ago
    > but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers This is a real phenomenon, but not in the way you think. Democrats have historically had a tech edge, because the real talent leans left politically. Obama kind of killed that, but for a good cause - he diverted a lot of those politically-driven types into working directly for the federal government under the umbrella of USDS and 18F.
0xEFF 7y ago
My dentist made me a custom night guard. Is he not owning and growing a real business? It’s quite the leap you make from there to religion.
- robomartin 7y ago
  You are extrapolating something I did not say.
steve76 7y ago
Check out job shop production system. There's talent there. Usually it's one guy who left the corporate world. Work a few days, when you need it, and then don't. Build what you want to see built. Only work for owners who share your vision. Work when it's in your interest. Don't work when it isn't. I've found with big projects, it always comes down to the crunch. Hundreds of details that the mind just overlooks which your customers don't. So products always get customized, and job shops always tend to have a product under the surface. --- --- --- Don't fret about this, devs. ACA got laughed at during launch. Now medical services are fundamentally transformed on their way to incremental development. This is how things get built. I saw it in the 80s, the decade they laughed at us, and then the 90s they loved us and everyone cashed in big. I want to see production in the waiting room, and a mobile healthcare imaging pulling up at the curb. I'm waiting for the Today show to start talking TypeScript. Oh boy, could I make our market sing.
zacharycohn 7y ago
Unless they're A) very large, and B) selling commodities, a company that works with one party will not hired by the other party. The two parties have two completely different sets of infrastructure.
- robomartin 7y ago
  Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be. Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking: Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of though can use their products to great effect. They benefit from everyone using this product, including, perhaps, their competitors and opposition. If, on the other hand, each political party hires a passionate coder to create their own kanban board software they are very likely to end-up with a bunch of suboptimal solutions. In other words, if they can, if the nature of the software allows, it would benefit them to look for universal providers rather than party-aligned providers. If you can trust Trello with your political party data you can then trust a similar company with other data you might produce with their software. I guess it comes down to the software. What kinds of things are they doing that requires custom tools that have to be written specifically for one party?
  - azernik 7y ago
    The essential factors [1] are: * There are types of software that are politics-specific, and therefore do not exist until a party pays for it to be made. * Politics is a zero-sum game: if you're funding software (either institutionally, or by being a tech worker who works below market wage For The Cause), you don't want it to be used by your political opponents. So commodity stuff that already exists is bipartisan. Any application that is specific to political campaigning is highly partisan. [1] There's also a secondary issue of data security for cloud products; parties maintain extensive voter files with things like past voting history, up-to-date contact information, and past contacts [1a]. They do not want this information falling into the hands of the opposing party, and so don't want their data touching any organization that might potentially have cross-partisan ties, or godforbid might have cotenancy for D and R data. [1a] This is basically the king of all CRMs, and these days they might be able to reimplement it as a bunch of plugins on top of a commercial provider like Salesforce, but those only became available relatively recently, data migration would be nontrivial, and there's a substantial amount of politics-specific functionality that would need to be rewritten as plugins.

nooron 7y ago

Hey, I appreciate your comment and I'm happy to share. It is very hard to make into a real business, very few people have succeeded. You do it because you believe in a cause or a candidate or a party. As far as why people don't sell to everyone, the above explains a lot. Another explanation is that political sales (which is different from true election tech, which is purchased by governments) are driven by trust and personal relationships. Once you work for one party in the US, the other will not trust you.

robomartin 7y ago
This is interesting and, yes, I do understand. Yet, another take on this is that groups (parties) would then rob themselves from perhaps working with or searching for the most capable of providers. I am not trying to diminish anyone at all, but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers, particularly so if what drives this is passion rather than a skilled software shop that with proven capabilities and experience across a range of relevant domains with an equally proven track record of delivering quality, well tested bug-free product. Of course, the parties would have to we willing to pay more than hobby money for what they need.
- azernik 7y ago
  > but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers This is a real phenomenon, but not in the way you think. Democrats have historically had a tech edge, because the real talent leans left politically. Obama kind of killed that, but for a good cause - he diverted a lot of those politically-driven types into working directly for the federal government under the umbrella of USDS and 18F.

0xEFF 7y ago

My dentist made me a custom night guard. Is he not owning and growing a real business? It’s quite the leap you make from there to religion.

robomartin 7y ago
You are extrapolating something I did not say.

steve76 7y ago

Check out job shop production system. There's talent there. Usually it's one guy who left the corporate world. Work a few days, when you need it, and then don't. Build what you want to see built. Only work for owners who share your vision. Work when it's in your interest. Don't work when it isn't. I've found with big projects, it always comes down to the crunch. Hundreds of details that the mind just overlooks which your customers don't. So products always get customized, and job shops always tend to have a product under the surface. --- --- --- Don't fret about this, devs. ACA got laughed at during launch. Now medical services are fundamentally transformed on their way to incremental development. This is how things get built. I saw it in the 80s, the decade they laughed at us, and then the 90s they loved us and everyone cashed in big. I want to see production in the waiting room, and a mobile healthcare imaging pulling up at the curb. I'm waiting for the Today show to start talking TypeScript. Oh boy, could I make our market sing.

zacharycohn 7y ago

Unless they're A) very large, and B) selling commodities, a company that works with one party will not hired by the other party. The two parties have two completely different sets of infrastructure.

robomartin 7y ago
Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be. Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking: Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of though can use their products to great effect. They benefit from everyone using this product, including, perhaps, their competitors and opposition. If, on the other hand, each political party hires a passionate coder to create their own kanban board software they are very likely to end-up with a bunch of suboptimal solutions. In other words, if they can, if the nature of the software allows, it would benefit them to look for universal providers rather than party-aligned providers. If you can trust Trello with your political party data you can then trust a similar company with other data you might produce with their software. I guess it comes down to the software. What kinds of things are they doing that requires custom tools that have to be written specifically for one party?
- azernik 7y ago
  The essential factors [1] are: * There are types of software that are politics-specific, and therefore do not exist until a party pays for it to be made. * Politics is a zero-sum game: if you're funding software (either institutionally, or by being a tech worker who works below market wage For The Cause), you don't want it to be used by your political opponents. So commodity stuff that already exists is bipartisan. Any application that is specific to political campaigning is highly partisan. [1] There's also a secondary issue of data security for cloud products; parties maintain extensive voter files with things like past voting history, up-to-date contact information, and past contacts [1a]. They do not want this information falling into the hands of the opposing party, and so don't want their data touching any organization that might potentially have cross-partisan ties, or godforbid might have cotenancy for D and R data. [1a] This is basically the king of all CRMs, and these days they might be able to reimplement it as a bunch of plugins on top of a commercial provider like Salesforce, but those only became available relatively recently, data migration would be nontrivial, and there's a substantial amount of politics-specific functionality that would need to be rewritten as plugins.