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I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need

I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. Trust me, you need much less to build something like this, and there's no excuse for it to suck so bad. I'm also curious, anyone know where the development actually happened? Did Deloitte further subcontracted out? Was it outsourced?

known 6y ago
This issue/corruption is addressed in https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015 https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015
scythe 6y ago
>At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. You can, but the government has to jump through a lot of hoops. Even government contractors have to jump through a lot of hoops. Sometimes there are regulations affecting the hiring process even for government contractors, e.g. drug tests, citizenship requirements, background checks, location requirements, etc. Every relevant law named after a sympathetic child adds $5B to development costs. And so forth.
tyingq 6y ago
Deloitte billable rates for the higher end folks are $350-700/hour. Scapegoat as a service isn't cheap.
BoorishBears 6y ago
I have no doubt the government got scammed, but often these estimates provision for things like ensuring phone support is available any time the website is up for accessibility requirements. That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis
- buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
  > That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis I’ve always wondered why this was the case. But surely inconveniencing the majority instead of making it more convenient for the minority is a step in the wrong direction. Whatever. Off topic...
dataflow 6y ago
> I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. Don't contractors do everything they can to milk government contracts as much as possible? I'm pretty sure I've even seen people provide advice on how to do this effectively right here on HN. So I can definitely understand how it happens...
- dmix 6y ago
  The difference is they aren’t paying the engineers 300k they are paying an endless amount of administrator executives with “industry experience” aka 20yrs emailing spreadsheets between other managers at IBM. I realized this once when I started attending (Canadian) gov ‘innovation’ events and ‘startup’ funding initiatives. There was hardly anyone I’d consider an engineer that is benefiting from these systems. It’s a giant well organized grift for washed up “industry” execs and others hangers on with friends in the right places. And I don’t mean to be ageist saying that. That would be over simplifying, but there is a inherent preference to those with safe names in their resume, regardless of relevancy. But there’s plenty of spaces in between for youthful people who understand how these meat factories work. Especially ones who understand their value, usually the unnamed ones working on the edges. But by the time it comes to actually making the meat most of the money has already been allocated to the aforementioned people and they rush to find outsource the “real” work to some overpaid consulting company who are also experts at fleecing these gov contracts with endless meetings and perfecting the right checkmarks get checked. I remember going to a Zuckerberg talk around 2010 at YC school at Stanford and he mentioned how he was hiring engineers even for the typical ‘executive’ jobs and I remember feeling like that’s the difference between startup tech companies and these failed hundred million dollar imitations. It all comes down to the people and which ones are getting the power. Basically which side of the “iron rule” they come from https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
  - BadInformatics 6y ago
    Having helped to clean up a couple of those messes IBM left behind in various parts of the Canadian public sector, the only silver lining I see is that governments are starting to take in-house dev talent and the digital service model seriously because nothing (in the best case scenario) gets done if you rely on IBM. Hopefully this trend continues and governments grow some teeth in contract negotiations because of it.
walrus01 6y ago
Or you could hire 73 engineers each paid 300k for a year, and have 22 million left over for hosting/operations/overhead costs... Absolutely ridiculous.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  You forgot annual bonuses for partners.
- Raidion 6y ago
  You get those 73 engineers in a room, then what? What do they write? You get 15 engineers, 3 DBAs, 5 sys admins + their managers. While that's spinning up, you get a bunch of business analyists to write the requirements. A first version gets written, it doesn't do what people want and the data it works from is really crappy, so you have to write a bunch of custom edge logic to deal with the crappy data. Repeat several times, including massive changes in scope. Like is there bloat on these projects? 100%, and a lot of it, but saying "just get 73 solid engineers in a room" doesn't really get you very far when the requirements are really really unknown.
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Requirements gathering is part of the job. Maybe more of a PM role but still something we all should be able to tackle.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    Ideally the requirements gathering wouldn't be a pile of tick boxes. Get them to sit next to the users (especially UI/UX) and see how the process happen. Ask questions. See how data entry people work. (Ideally. In the real world it will be a very thorny and boring process)
    - JamesSwift 6y ago
      Yes, and in the process of that discovery it turns out the "process" is 100 different processes for 100 different people. One person performs data entry by faxing a handwritten list of excel data. One person just tells the current DBA what to put into the DB. One person uses a homegrown webapp that some intern built to automate some of their process. "This is asinine!" you say. "Just make sure you dont break our existing workflow" they reply.
xyzzy123 6y ago
I don't think you're really paying for the development per se. Most of the effort is actually managing the customer. That is, their contracting requirements, the whole requirements process, procurement hoops, change process, optics management, cost of "sales", reporting requirements, various additional compliance requirements...
- fatbird 6y ago
  This is a large part of the truth. Crank out a booking website? Give me a couple weeks. Deal with your byzantine organization, your incoherent standards, your security department coming out of the woodwork with list of requirements, your torturous system for provisioning government services like VMs in secure data centres... and then pile on that integration with a variety of legacy systems across another slew of organizations that bring all their own baggage to the process. I would blame government, but I'm simultaneously experiencing all these issues with a Fortune 100 company. They're almost indistinguishable in the degree to which their cumulative organizational headwind is a hurricane I'm supposed to fly into. It's simply hard past a certain scale for purely people and procedure reasons.
  - fatbird 6y ago
    And let's not forget that 1/3rd of the way through, when you're demonstrating an impressive amount of progress with a working prototype, some decision maker will say "you know, we could really make this a two-for-one if we tied it into this other program...", and start the 1,000 hours of meetings to get to development all over again.
hntrader 6y ago
The Obamacare website cost $2 billion according to a Bloomberg piece in 2014. Don't ask me how that's even possible.
- rtx 6y ago
  It's possible if some money is flowing back to the people approving the deal.
- pxeboot 6y ago
  And don't forget the State of Oregon paid an additional $240 million for their own version of it [1]. [1] https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-lawsuits-for-100m/ https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-...
  - mraza007 6y ago
    Wow I’m amazed like how much money can made if you are into government contracting I’m just curious to know can you get government contracts let’s say if you are running a software agency
    - Zenst 6y ago
      Yes, how to apply and secure governmental contracts and grants is something many educational curriculum miss out upon in life.
      - hertzrat 6y ago
        How does the process work?
        raverbashing 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_... This is the overview, there are other websites that go more into the details if you google it But basically it is survival of the most boring and the most detailistic. Then of course you lose the tender because you weren't "in the know", or you missed the requirements of the Toilet Procurement acts of 1974 which specified the thickness and traction resistance of toilet paper used in government purchases. Oh and if you're "lucky" your Health contract management software will suddenly have to be able to order pizza as well, you know, it's "just an extra thing". But you won't get paid while that doesn't happen (ok this might not apply to the USA specifically, but you get the idea)
tidepod12 6y ago
I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing business model based on taking vague business requirements and having huge teams of project managers/developers/consultants/advisors/etc ready to go at nearly a moments notice. $44 million is an egregious number and I don't know how it's that high, but I'm betting at least part of it has to do with the fact that this was a website with an accelerated timeline, which probably necessitated a premium.
- zucker42 6y ago
  > but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this Isn't the whole article about how they failed to mobilize quickly?
- 1986 6y ago
  Yeah, but if it got done in time but works so poorly that no one is using it, does that model actually work for anything other than being able to say "we got it done"?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Can't we throw away the information implied by the contract that resulted in something worthless? (I'm not taking the dismissive 'this is easy' side of the argument here, but the project failed, the lessons learned need to start there, not with the terms of the contract)
- 300bps 6y ago
  That’s not my experience. I was hired for a particular engagement with Microsoft years ago by a similar firm. Microsoft needed x, the firm had nobody so they put out an urgent call and passed me off like I was one of their long-time employees. I think it’s safe to say nobody has a bench of 146 people ready to go at a moment’s notice.
lumost 6y ago
As software goes, it's pretty likely that if you hire 146 engineers to build a website that could be built and supported with a team of 8.. you are almost certain to get a buggy mess that takes 146 engineers to maintain and support. After all, the architecture will need to accommodate 18 8 person teams, provide scope for ~20 Staff engineers along with a full layer of middle management. I wouldn't be surprised if these proposals take into account headcount as a positive for both quality and job creation purposes.
mdorazio 6y ago
These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.
- deleted 6y ago
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- robomartin 6y ago
  Not to mention the terms in these kinds of contracts. The only way to deal with them is to charge enough to be protected. I have sold product (hardware) to places like the Navy Surface Warfare Center and White Sands Missile Test Range. If you are not careful you can come out losing in a big way. For example, for each day/week/month you deliver past the estimated delivery date they discount 5% from your invoice. Sound like great motivation to deliver on time, right? Well, no, it's a guaranteed 100% (or whatever you can get away with) markup beyond what you would have charged because if anything goes wrong you'll go broke. That said, this issue of super-expensive government websites done wrong feels all too common. You have to wonder how much cash we burn repeating the same mistakes.
- deleted 6y ago
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- stefan_ 6y ago
  When did we have the last nationwide vaccination campaign, whats the "legacy"? Pretty sure that was when IBM still made tabulators. I think you will find that if only there was someone in charge to put their foot down, you can do without a whole lot of these things. But that's part of the problem of course: the government contracting out is just a bunch of clueless people making up a wish list with a partner on the other side whose only inclination is to say yes to everything.
NearAP 6y ago
This is not a 'software engineering' thing. If you look at it from a software development POV, then the issue is more of not having 'product managers' whose job it is to - understand the requirements, write the specs, basically champion the POV of the end user (after actually identifying the correct end user). Examples a) The article talked about the software not working on Internet Explorer (IE). Older people still use IE. Software Engs with fewer years of experience tend to optimize for FF, Chrome and latest version of IE. b) The article talked about 'wrong' placement of buttons (probably the software is not responsive or not optimized for phones or older phones) c) Input fields seem to be rigid (older people will make mistakes) d) Once you're registered, you can't switch from patient to staff. This should have been designed like a 2-sided marketplace with the ability of one person to sometimes play the 2 roles If you don't have the right spec/requirements, the output of the engineers will still be bad
- db48x 6y ago
  Exactly. Civil Engineering does this better, I think. In a civil engineering project such as a bridge, the requirements may be written down by the customer, but the engineering design of the bridge is entirely the responsibility of a single architect. You can pretty much bet that the city council who bought the bridge doesn't know a thing about physics or engineering, so if the bridge falls down it has to be the architect's fault (assuming that it was built according to the plan). This gives the architect the power to say "no" to the customer.
- bbeesley 6y ago
  Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users. That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough ask. No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent. Idk, points a through c are basically already solved problems. I’d be disappointed to see problems like that if I was spending $20,000 let alone millions. Issue d though does feel like the sort of thing that you didn’t know was on the horizon up front, would be a pretty major rebuild to add in later on.
vbordo 6y ago
Agreed. You can also argue that inflated contract cost in a statement of work leads to artificial labor bloat on the project. This benefits the consulting firm while disadvantaging the client. The unnecessary labor can create collaboration friction and lead to technical decisions like adopting microservices despite not being necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of the project. This kind of complexity doesn't guarantee a higher quality product is delivered to the client. Instead, it's used to justify follow-on work, further extracting dollars from the client. It's possible there's context we don't have that exponentially increases the complexity of their tech requirements and justifies the price here but I'm skeptical. Looks more like misaligned economic incentives commonly at play in engagements between consulting firms and the gov.
walrus01 6y ago
If you want to see another ultimate example of this sort of contracting gone awry, google "canada federal payroll phoenix system" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+federal+payroll+phoenix+system https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+fe... example news URL: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/phoenix-payroll-system-timeline-of-the-governments-problems/396407 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/phoenix-payroll-system...
- amscanne 6y ago
  Seems like it’s a few hundred million. IMHO Canada has no better example of idiotic spending than eHealth in Ontario. Literally 1 billion spent, and nothing to show for it. (Though they now have something, after effectively restarting.)
exabrial 6y ago
This is way the government works and why taxation is the fuel that feeds the fire. Trust me, this money did not go to waste. Someone got paid, someone has a new yacht.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
stefan_ 6y ago
Apparently this is the system: https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/login/ https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/login/ It didn't load earlier (infinite redirect), right now its a Salesforce error page, of course. Salesforce and Deloitte, a match made in heaven.
- sk5t 6y ago
  It's long been said: if you want good software, get a bunch of accountants--and folks who want to take marching orders from accountants--to build it.
jimsmart 6y ago
It's a bit like some of the costs that have been quoted for some of the covid track and trace apps. Whilst I do realise some of these quoted costs involve more than just the development of the app itself, some of the numbers are utterly ludicrous IMO as a software developer. e.g. Germany's app apparently cost approx €20 million. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-best-coronavirus-tracing-app/a-53825213 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-best-coronavirus-trac...
ilaksh 6y ago
Many years ago early in my career I worked at an an engineering firm as a third-party contractor doing programming for a large municipal blackwater system. Despite the fact that I was working on critical code implementing core requirements of the system, I was only paid $20/hr. I believe the firm was charged $40-60. Long before I started working in the product and before any working software was deployed, the majority of the budget was spent. I believe they had at least three civil engineers, and a hands-off software architect who I only saw once, developing a document with hundreds of pages of studies and requirements. I remember one severe issue we had was that I was not allowed to test on the real database or one of a similar size. So a main query was tested the day it was deployed (on some extremely expensive Oracle server which was very outdated). And unfortunately my query did not perform adequately on the larger dataset. But the senior programmer decided not to tell me or to try to fix it. He just truncated my query with LIMIT and said nothing. This resulted in the query breaking and showing an error, and totally incomplete and invalid data. It is amazing it actually continued at all from that point but unfortunately it did. I only found out about it several weeks later when the project manager decided to take me on a visit. Strangely, no one ever mentioned the issue, nor addressed my immediate suggestion that the software could not operate without the problem being fixed. I assume the other programmer just said "well that guy is inexperienced" and they had other projects to work on and no budget left so they just left it for quite awhile. Anyway I could not believe that so I left shortly after.
bawolff 6y ago
I mean, given the results, it seems pretty clear they didn't know what to ask for, how to specify requirements, how to verify they got what they asked for, etc. That sort of thing doesn't get easier if you're hiring your own engineers.
bluedino 6y ago
>> At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. It’s Deloitte, they probably hired 100 developers for 80k and 50 project managers for 300k
- aweiland 6y ago
  Both numbers are too high.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  Deloitte. 60k, 150k. $13.5MM. That leaves $30MM for partner bonuses.
mikeho1999 6y ago
Full disclosure: I have had the distinct "privilege" on having worked with all aspects of large consulting firms, from working at Cap Gemini, to being a sub for a smaller company on a large gov't contract with Lockheed Martin, to actually competing (and winning) against the large companies with my own, small consulting company startup. In short, the above comment is spot on. Companies like Deloitte, Cap Gemini, PwC, etc. all make their margins purely on their reputation. Just like back in the 80s when the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became popular, I think from the mid-90s all the way through to even 2010s there has been a similar sentiment with large, multinational consulting companies. These consulting companies know they have a strong reputation for large scale, enterprise software projects, and so they will milk margins by charging high rates, upselling all sorts of additional features, and fulfilling projects with the lowest cost resources, whether it'd be outsourcing overseas, utilizing H1-B workers, or bringing in recent college grads. (Accenture is probably one of the most notorious for this -- not sure if they still do this now, but back in the early 2000s, they were known for bringing in college grads from all sorts of usually non-STEM majors, and they would put them through a 2-week bootcamp (er "Core Analyst Training") out in St. Charles, where more focus was on the partying and hooking up than anything else, but then shortly afterword, they'd be put on projects where they'd be expected to do technical design and even coding, while being billed out at $180+/hour) Now, in all fairness, for every highly publicized, disastrous rollout that one of these companies gets notoriety for, there are actually still dozens of much less public, relatively successful implementations that gets deployed without any issue or fanfare. But despite this, the costs for even the successful projects are still ridiculously high. As the main reason for their huge margins are primarily in their reputations, then as their reputations continue to erode from things like this news piece, clients will start to wonder if the large costs can continue to be justified. And I'm beginning to see this sentiment directly -- my small dozen-person consulting company has not only been able to compete directly against these larger companies, but we have started winning contracts against them as well. For the latest contract we won, we bid at about 20% of what one of the larger companies ended up coming in at -- they actually thought they were a shoe-in because they were the incumbent, having built out several other projects already for the client. But we ended up being selected not just because of our pricing, but because of our overall proposal, favorable terms and expertise on the domain. What's even more surprising is that even though we offered "bargain basement" pricing relative to theirs, it will still end up being the most profitable project we have had to-date -- it just makes it crazy to think what kind of profits/margins that they can make.
Zenst 6y ago
> At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year Maybe they did and the too many chefs to cooks ratio played out, seen and experienced that.
nojito 6y ago
Liability and integration causes bloated costs. The bigger issue is that it’s a no bid contract. However there’s no real process for verifying individuals who bid in a timely way.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I work in defense and I always say the govt pays $100 for $1 of actual work. It makes me pretty angry at times as a taxpayer. The worst part is that we know government software contracts are done completely wrong but the government doesn't want to change. Too much money to be made.
option 6y ago
this just smells corruption. Plain and simple, alas happens not only in “3rd world countries”
Romanulus 6y ago
Deloitte held a big govt. contract back when I worked there back in the day... long story short, they had a strong track record of providing the worst service, a terrible product, and was ultimately made a very bad reputation for themselves as time went on (through the local media, etc).
tootie 6y ago
Aside from all the other answers, it would cost you millions to hire and onboard 146 qualified engineers. A place like Deloitte can drop them on your doorstep with a week's notice. They also have all the product design, strategy, and organization layers required to stand up the equivalent of mid-size enterprise from scratch really quickly and then tear it all back down a year later. I've worked in this business for smaller agencies and we could absolutely work miracles for stodgy organizations. My biggest account probably took in $20M all told and I'd say we earned every penny and launched a really successful product really quickly. Failures can happen too and they're usually a lot more complicated than just incompetent developers. It's just as likely the client is unable to articulate need accurately and corners get cut.
ryanSrich 6y ago
These deals are mostly to help out friends and line pockets. Building something that works doesn’t even matter. Government contracting is one of the biggest scams happening in broad daylight.
jmeister 6y ago
They needed to hire somebody better. Palantir would probably have gotten it done for much lesser, faster.
adamjb 6y ago
Divide that number by 3-5, for starters. Charge out rates are multiples of salaries.
thegeekpirate 6y ago
FWIW, feel free to take a look at this contract from the BC government for a centralized education website (http://docs.openinfo.gov.bc.ca/D29078314A_Response_Package_EDU-2013-00142.PDF http://docs.openinfo.gov.bc.ca/D29078314A_Response_Package_E...). This is what it looks like (https://i.imgur.com/fmUVYhG.png https://i.imgur.com/fmUVYhG.png), and for comparison, here is the old website (https://i.imgur.com/IW5J9gS.png https://i.imgur.com/IW5J9gS.png). This is projected to cost 95 million dollars over 12 years. Yep.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jiggawatts 6y ago
Let me try to explain using analogies. Organisations are like people. Their culture is like someone's personality. Dealing with easygoing people is much smoother than paranoid delusional people with OCD. In the same way, dealing with government agencies is difficult because their corporate culture -- their personality -- is not what most people would categorise as normal. These deals aren't normal deals. They're the equivalent of specialist treatment for someone with mental problems. Take for example an organisation like SpaceX: They simply do things. If some manager goes to Elon with a rational but inherently risky proposal, he'll weigh the risk and then more than likely give the goahead. Other companies have a lower risk appetite, but they will take occasional risks. Sometimes huge ones. Large federal government organisations are the diametric opposite of this kind of agile, low-overhead, no-bullshit private company. Their appetite for risk is precisely zero. That's difficult for people to wrap their head around. It's like a superconductor. It's not just a "really good conductor". It's not a "little better than copper". No, it's something fundamentally different. This kind of zero tolerance squeezes out entire lines of thought, just like a superconductor expels a magnetic field. Notice how in this article the blame is on Deloitte and the "problem" is that there was a failure. This isn't a fault, this is the system working precisely as designed. Nobody will get fired for picking Deloitte, their purpose all along was to take the blame for the low-low price of a mere $44M so that a government employee making $100K won't have to have a couple of uncomfortable meetings. The problem isn't that there was a failure, that happens all the time with software projects. The problem is that risk in government agencies is managed by people with essentially infinite source of free money that they can draw down on in order to protect themselves. If a magic genie gave you a million dollars every week to spend on your own safety with no strings attached, wouldn't you? Would you say "no"? Really?
- timmy-turner 6y ago
  Reading "Let me try to explain using analogies.", I was worried someone would come up with another car anology. Seeing orgs as people with characters, oh my, my eyes are opened now. Sounds weird but it makes sense the few times that I have worked on contracted projects. For me, an added complexity in gauging the other side of the contract is that their personality changes depending on the actual people that are involved. When some higher-ups join the project it in later stages, the personality may turns even more mental than it already is.
codpiece 6y ago
I noticed a Salesforce blue cloud favicon when I interacted with the system.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Yep... "The vaccine management solution is a mobile-ready application that is built on our existing GovConnect Salesforce platform." https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solutions/vaccine-management-system.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solution...
juskrey 6y ago
From time to time I am trying to crawl government procurement portals for projects, and dropping the idea after a couple of hours again and again: only proposal, initial negotiation and documentation will probably require several people full time, this is even before any project movements.. Mind that, this it's the system where you're bidding for months for a project, and even if you have won and was good at delivery, you will be doing all the rounds for the next one again. So governments, sort of meaning to drive the price down via tenders, in reality are paying for all the losing bids too, and paying a lot.
Cd00d 6y ago
Your point stands, but a nitpick - don't forget overhead. You should roughly double engineer salary to cover overhead, so it's 146 engs at 150k (still good), or 75 engs at 300. Either way, the deal should be possible.
tvon 6y ago
It is not a tech problem, it is a people problem.
ddingus 6y ago
And the government can own the code, publish, and as the site finishes up, that team can proceed to apply all they learned and built to other pressing tasks. A decade of that, and a whole lot of government would be awesome. Of course, these arguments have been made many times. Money in politics prevents it. I have presented them. I have watched large donations and a couple nice dinners make the whole idea go away. :(
WalterBright 6y ago
I once hired a company to do some structural repairs. The company usually did contract work for the government. Some weeks went by. I was billed a progress payment of $5000, but the company hadn't actually accomplished anything - just reviews, several site visits, meetings, evaluations, memos, emails and constant reassignments of who was working on it. I fired them and refused to pay their bill (they hadn't even produced a plan for how they were going to proceed). Hired another outfit, who did the entire job front to back for $5000, and got it done in a couple weeks.
bredren 6y ago
This is the same old argument used against Burning Man org’s ticketing system.
3327 6y ago
Deloitte should be investigated for defrauding tax payers
vncecartersknee 6y ago
I used to have a few friends who worked at deloitte as analysts I'd often catch up with them for lunch or after work drinks and I can guarantee you this was most likely made by a bunch of coked out 22 year olds working until 3am every night for a couple of months It reminded me of a university style group project, constantly astonished that they’d turn over a few 10's of thousands of lines of python code that (usually) some government department was paying millions for. Not to smear my friends who worked there who must have to work incredibly hard given the conditions and the stress they were under, I always suspected their code must have been absolutely riddled with bugs, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like for the next poor grads who had to work on it after them. And it was always some project where I was amazed there wasn't already some mature software out there that accomplished what they were doing anyway. But anyway they seemed to have fun so whatever
bhouston 6y ago
I believe Deloitte just PMs the project and farms it out to a sub contractor. This is standard operating procedure. I understand the Deloitte prefers heavily documented and waterfall development with overseas developers doing the work. Basically top heavy and expensive management and cheap dev resources.
CraigJPerry 6y ago
Those would be public employees, the argument is you’d be crowding out private enterprise. Government should be small goes the argument.
KorematsuFred 6y ago
Oh my sweet summer child, thou has not seen the internal working of government contracts. In order to qualify to even bid on a contract there is a pretty high entry barrier. The amount of time it will take you to cross that barrier would be more than amount of time it will take you to start a real business. Bidding is another expensive process which costs money. If you bid on 10 contracts in a year and win one the cost of bidding on rest 9 contracts must be covered to the won contract. Then comes the compliance costs of various government regulations. In a startup world you can take up accessibility as a P2 item but in government contracts it is a P0. So there are all these complexities involved which bloat the contract. Government has passed probably thousand regulations on whom you can hire and how you work, where the data is stored and what kind of background verification you have done on your employees. Of course if you and I were to develop a similar website we could do it for $4M and spare some cash to buy couple of Ferraris. PS. There is also bribes. Of course these are never called so but you have to spend good amount of time golfing with right people, throwing parties, offering front row seats to NBA finals and those sort of things to get your files moving.
that_guy_iain 6y ago
My first IT job was with a hosting company that noticed how much the goverment contracts were bloated. They then spent ages trying to become an offical supplier so they could undercut companies charging so much more. Literally, one of the issues they had was that so many people were curious as to how the company could make a profit since the prices were so much lower than all the other contractors like Serco. We also ended up being in contact with Serco about a tender they had to redo one of the goverment websites. We ended up not getting any work from that because Serco was under pressure to stop outsourcing all their contracts. Goverment contracts just send lots of money to companies who already have lots of money.
- barrkel 6y ago
  Serco
  - that_guy_iain 6y ago
    Thanks, I've updated it with the correct spelling.
atlgator 6y ago
The 44M is most likely over 5 years. Knowing Deloitte generally comes in on the high side of pricing I'd say it's around a 37 person team, cross functional including PMs, BAs, developers, testers, devops, Section 508 compliance, IA, user support.
atlgator 6y ago
It's Time and Materials/staff aug contracting - meaning Deloitte isn't selling an end product, they are selling staff on a per hour basis. As with other types of contracting, the hourly rate has a huge markup on it to cover indirect costs as well as profit. They make a lot less profit than you think though. Most of it is indirect costs.
ohnoesoes 6y ago
explain that to WAANK managers

known 6y ago

This issue/corruption is addressed in https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015 https://yts.mx/movies/a-good-american-2015

scythe 6y ago

>At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. You can, but the government has to jump through a lot of hoops. Even government contractors have to jump through a lot of hoops. Sometimes there are regulations affecting the hiring process even for government contractors, e.g. drug tests, citizenship requirements, background checks, location requirements, etc. Every relevant law named after a sympathetic child adds $5B to development costs. And so forth.

tyingq 6y ago

Deloitte billable rates for the higher end folks are $350-700/hour. Scapegoat as a service isn't cheap.

BoorishBears 6y ago

I have no doubt the government got scammed, but often these estimates provision for things like ensuring phone support is available any time the website is up for accessibility requirements. That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
> That's also why you see some government sites operate on a 9-5 basis I’ve always wondered why this was the case. But surely inconveniencing the majority instead of making it more convenient for the minority is a step in the wrong direction. Whatever. Off topic...

dataflow 6y ago

> I just don't understand these software deals, the price is so high. Don't contractors do everything they can to milk government contracts as much as possible? I'm pretty sure I've even seen people provide advice on how to do this effectively right here on HN. So I can definitely understand how it happens...

dmix 6y ago
The difference is they aren’t paying the engineers 300k they are paying an endless amount of administrator executives with “industry experience” aka 20yrs emailing spreadsheets between other managers at IBM. I realized this once when I started attending (Canadian) gov ‘innovation’ events and ‘startup’ funding initiatives. There was hardly anyone I’d consider an engineer that is benefiting from these systems. It’s a giant well organized grift for washed up “industry” execs and others hangers on with friends in the right places. And I don’t mean to be ageist saying that. That would be over simplifying, but there is a inherent preference to those with safe names in their resume, regardless of relevancy. But there’s plenty of spaces in between for youthful people who understand how these meat factories work. Especially ones who understand their value, usually the unnamed ones working on the edges. But by the time it comes to actually making the meat most of the money has already been allocated to the aforementioned people and they rush to find outsource the “real” work to some overpaid consulting company who are also experts at fleecing these gov contracts with endless meetings and perfecting the right checkmarks get checked. I remember going to a Zuckerberg talk around 2010 at YC school at Stanford and he mentioned how he was hiring engineers even for the typical ‘executive’ jobs and I remember feeling like that’s the difference between startup tech companies and these failed hundred million dollar imitations. It all comes down to the people and which ones are getting the power. Basically which side of the “iron rule” they come from https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
- BadInformatics 6y ago
  Having helped to clean up a couple of those messes IBM left behind in various parts of the Canadian public sector, the only silver lining I see is that governments are starting to take in-house dev talent and the digital service model seriously because nothing (in the best case scenario) gets done if you rely on IBM. Hopefully this trend continues and governments grow some teeth in contract negotiations because of it.

walrus01 6y ago

Or you could hire 73 engineers each paid 300k for a year, and have 22 million left over for hosting/operations/overhead costs... Absolutely ridiculous.

FireBeyond 6y ago
You forgot annual bonuses for partners.
Raidion 6y ago
You get those 73 engineers in a room, then what? What do they write? You get 15 engineers, 3 DBAs, 5 sys admins + their managers. While that's spinning up, you get a bunch of business analyists to write the requirements. A first version gets written, it doesn't do what people want and the data it works from is really crappy, so you have to write a bunch of custom edge logic to deal with the crappy data. Repeat several times, including massive changes in scope. Like is there bloat on these projects? 100%, and a lot of it, but saying "just get 73 solid engineers in a room" doesn't really get you very far when the requirements are really really unknown.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Requirements gathering is part of the job. Maybe more of a PM role but still something we all should be able to tackle.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Ideally the requirements gathering wouldn't be a pile of tick boxes. Get them to sit next to the users (especially UI/UX) and see how the process happen. Ask questions. See how data entry people work. (Ideally. In the real world it will be a very thorny and boring process)
  - JamesSwift 6y ago
    Yes, and in the process of that discovery it turns out the "process" is 100 different processes for 100 different people. One person performs data entry by faxing a handwritten list of excel data. One person just tells the current DBA what to put into the DB. One person uses a homegrown webapp that some intern built to automate some of their process. "This is asinine!" you say. "Just make sure you dont break our existing workflow" they reply.

xyzzy123 6y ago

I don't think you're really paying for the development per se. Most of the effort is actually managing the customer. That is, their contracting requirements, the whole requirements process, procurement hoops, change process, optics management, cost of "sales", reporting requirements, various additional compliance requirements...

fatbird 6y ago
This is a large part of the truth. Crank out a booking website? Give me a couple weeks. Deal with your byzantine organization, your incoherent standards, your security department coming out of the woodwork with list of requirements, your torturous system for provisioning government services like VMs in secure data centres... and then pile on that integration with a variety of legacy systems across another slew of organizations that bring all their own baggage to the process. I would blame government, but I'm simultaneously experiencing all these issues with a Fortune 100 company. They're almost indistinguishable in the degree to which their cumulative organizational headwind is a hurricane I'm supposed to fly into. It's simply hard past a certain scale for purely people and procedure reasons.
- fatbird 6y ago
  And let's not forget that 1/3rd of the way through, when you're demonstrating an impressive amount of progress with a working prototype, some decision maker will say "you know, we could really make this a two-for-one if we tied it into this other program...", and start the 1,000 hours of meetings to get to development all over again.

hntrader 6y ago

The Obamacare website cost $2 billion according to a Bloomberg piece in 2014. Don't ask me how that's even possible.

rtx 6y ago
It's possible if some money is flowing back to the people approving the deal.
pxeboot 6y ago
And don't forget the State of Oregon paid an additional $240 million for their own version of it [1]. [1] https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-lawsuits-for-100m/ https://www.koin.com/news/oregon-oracle-settle-cover-oregon-...
- mraza007 6y ago
  Wow I’m amazed like how much money can made if you are into government contracting I’m just curious to know can you get government contracts let’s say if you are running a software agency
  - Zenst 6y ago
    Yes, how to apply and secure governmental contracts and grants is something many educational curriculum miss out upon in life.
    - hertzrat 6y ago
      How does the process work?
      - raverbashing 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_... This is the overview, there are other websites that go more into the details if you google it But basically it is survival of the most boring and the most detailistic. Then of course you lose the tender because you weren't "in the know", or you missed the requirements of the Toilet Procurement acts of 1974 which specified the thickness and traction resistance of toilet paper used in government purchases. Oh and if you're "lucky" your Health contract management software will suddenly have to be able to order pizza as well, you know, it's "just an extra thing". But you won't get paid while that doesn't happen (ok this might not apply to the USA specifically, but you get the idea)

tidepod12 6y ago

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing business model based on taking vague business requirements and having huge teams of project managers/developers/consultants/advisors/etc ready to go at nearly a moments notice. $44 million is an egregious number and I don't know how it's that high, but I'm betting at least part of it has to do with the fact that this was a website with an accelerated timeline, which probably necessitated a premium.

zucker42 6y ago
> but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this Isn't the whole article about how they failed to mobilize quickly?
1986 6y ago
Yeah, but if it got done in time but works so poorly that no one is using it, does that model actually work for anything other than being able to say "we got it done"?
maxerickson 6y ago
Can't we throw away the information implied by the contract that resulted in something worthless? (I'm not taking the dismissive 'this is easy' side of the argument here, but the project failed, the lessons learned need to start there, not with the terms of the contract)
300bps 6y ago
That’s not my experience. I was hired for a particular engagement with Microsoft years ago by a similar firm. Microsoft needed x, the firm had nobody so they put out an urgent call and passed me off like I was one of their long-time employees. I think it’s safe to say nobody has a bench of 146 people ready to go at a moment’s notice.

lumost 6y ago

As software goes, it's pretty likely that if you hire 146 engineers to build a website that could be built and supported with a team of 8.. you are almost certain to get a buggy mess that takes 146 engineers to maintain and support. After all, the architecture will need to accommodate 18 8 person teams, provide scope for ~20 Staff engineers along with a full layer of middle management. I wouldn't be surprised if these proposals take into account headcount as a positive for both quality and job creation purposes.

mdorazio 6y ago

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.

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robomartin 6y ago
Not to mention the terms in these kinds of contracts. The only way to deal with them is to charge enough to be protected. I have sold product (hardware) to places like the Navy Surface Warfare Center and White Sands Missile Test Range. If you are not careful you can come out losing in a big way. For example, for each day/week/month you deliver past the estimated delivery date they discount 5% from your invoice. Sound like great motivation to deliver on time, right? Well, no, it's a guaranteed 100% (or whatever you can get away with) markup beyond what you would have charged because if anything goes wrong you'll go broke. That said, this issue of super-expensive government websites done wrong feels all too common. You have to wonder how much cash we burn repeating the same mistakes.
deleted 6y ago
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stefan_ 6y ago
When did we have the last nationwide vaccination campaign, whats the "legacy"? Pretty sure that was when IBM still made tabulators. I think you will find that if only there was someone in charge to put their foot down, you can do without a whole lot of these things. But that's part of the problem of course: the government contracting out is just a bunch of clueless people making up a wish list with a partner on the other side whose only inclination is to say yes to everything.

NearAP 6y ago

This is not a 'software engineering' thing. If you look at it from a software development POV, then the issue is more of not having 'product managers' whose job it is to - understand the requirements, write the specs, basically champion the POV of the end user (after actually identifying the correct end user). Examples a) The article talked about the software not working on Internet Explorer (IE). Older people still use IE. Software Engs with fewer years of experience tend to optimize for FF, Chrome and latest version of IE. b) The article talked about 'wrong' placement of buttons (probably the software is not responsive or not optimized for phones or older phones) c) Input fields seem to be rigid (older people will make mistakes) d) Once you're registered, you can't switch from patient to staff. This should have been designed like a 2-sided marketplace with the ability of one person to sometimes play the 2 roles If you don't have the right spec/requirements, the output of the engineers will still be bad

db48x 6y ago
Exactly. Civil Engineering does this better, I think. In a civil engineering project such as a bridge, the requirements may be written down by the customer, but the engineering design of the bridge is entirely the responsibility of a single architect. You can pretty much bet that the city council who bought the bridge doesn't know a thing about physics or engineering, so if the bridge falls down it has to be the architect's fault (assuming that it was built according to the plan). This gives the architect the power to say "no" to the customer.
bbeesley 6y ago
Internet Explorer has less than a 2% market share in the US, so under normal circumstances (given the sacrifices you’d have to make everywhere else) not bothering to support is is often a sensible decision. When it’s an access to healthcare issue though you can’t really exclude 2% of users. That said, building something that works well on mobile (re your point b) but also works on internet explorer is a pretty tough ask. No reason you couldn’t build a basic bitches version of the site that works on old devices, then route traffic these based on user agent. Idk, points a through c are basically already solved problems. I’d be disappointed to see problems like that if I was spending $20,000 let alone millions. Issue d though does feel like the sort of thing that you didn’t know was on the horizon up front, would be a pretty major rebuild to add in later on.

vbordo 6y ago

Agreed. You can also argue that inflated contract cost in a statement of work leads to artificial labor bloat on the project. This benefits the consulting firm while disadvantaging the client. The unnecessary labor can create collaboration friction and lead to technical decisions like adopting microservices despite not being necessary to fulfill the technical requirements of the project. This kind of complexity doesn't guarantee a higher quality product is delivered to the client. Instead, it's used to justify follow-on work, further extracting dollars from the client. It's possible there's context we don't have that exponentially increases the complexity of their tech requirements and justifies the price here but I'm skeptical. Looks more like misaligned economic incentives commonly at play in engagements between consulting firms and the gov.

walrus01 6y ago

If you want to see another ultimate example of this sort of contracting gone awry, google "canada federal payroll phoenix system" https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+federal+payroll+phoenix+system https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+fe... example news URL: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/phoenix-payroll-system-timeline-of-the-governments-problems/396407 https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/phoenix-payroll-system...

amscanne 6y ago
Seems like it’s a few hundred million. IMHO Canada has no better example of idiotic spending than eHealth in Ontario. Literally 1 billion spent, and nothing to show for it. (Though they now have something, after effectively restarting.)

exabrial 6y ago

This is way the government works and why taxation is the fuel that feeds the fire. Trust me, this money did not go to waste. Someone got paid, someone has a new yacht.

deleted 6y ago
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stefan_ 6y ago

Apparently this is the system: https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/login/ https://vams.cdc.gov/vaccineportal/s/login/ It didn't load earlier (infinite redirect), right now its a Salesforce error page, of course. Salesforce and Deloitte, a match made in heaven.

sk5t 6y ago
It's long been said: if you want good software, get a bunch of accountants--and folks who want to take marching orders from accountants--to build it.

jimsmart 6y ago

It's a bit like some of the costs that have been quoted for some of the covid track and trace apps. Whilst I do realise some of these quoted costs involve more than just the development of the app itself, some of the numbers are utterly ludicrous IMO as a software developer. e.g. Germany's app apparently cost approx €20 million. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-best-coronavirus-tracing-app/a-53825213 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-best-coronavirus-trac...

ilaksh 6y ago

Many years ago early in my career I worked at an an engineering firm as a third-party contractor doing programming for a large municipal blackwater system. Despite the fact that I was working on critical code implementing core requirements of the system, I was only paid $20/hr. I believe the firm was charged $40-60. Long before I started working in the product and before any working software was deployed, the majority of the budget was spent. I believe they had at least three civil engineers, and a hands-off software architect who I only saw once, developing a document with hundreds of pages of studies and requirements. I remember one severe issue we had was that I was not allowed to test on the real database or one of a similar size. So a main query was tested the day it was deployed (on some extremely expensive Oracle server which was very outdated). And unfortunately my query did not perform adequately on the larger dataset. But the senior programmer decided not to tell me or to try to fix it. He just truncated my query with LIMIT and said nothing. This resulted in the query breaking and showing an error, and totally incomplete and invalid data. It is amazing it actually continued at all from that point but unfortunately it did. I only found out about it several weeks later when the project manager decided to take me on a visit. Strangely, no one ever mentioned the issue, nor addressed my immediate suggestion that the software could not operate without the problem being fixed. I assume the other programmer just said "well that guy is inexperienced" and they had other projects to work on and no budget left so they just left it for quite awhile. Anyway I could not believe that so I left shortly after.

bawolff 6y ago

I mean, given the results, it seems pretty clear they didn't know what to ask for, how to specify requirements, how to verify they got what they asked for, etc. That sort of thing doesn't get easier if you're hiring your own engineers.

bluedino 6y ago

>> At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year. It’s Deloitte, they probably hired 100 developers for 80k and 50 project managers for 300k

aweiland 6y ago
Both numbers are too high.
FireBeyond 6y ago
Deloitte. 60k, 150k. $13.5MM. That leaves $30MM for partner bonuses.

mikeho1999 6y ago

Full disclosure: I have had the distinct "privilege" on having worked with all aspects of large consulting firms, from working at Cap Gemini, to being a sub for a smaller company on a large gov't contract with Lockheed Martin, to actually competing (and winning) against the large companies with my own, small consulting company startup. In short, the above comment is spot on. Companies like Deloitte, Cap Gemini, PwC, etc. all make their margins purely on their reputation. Just like back in the 80s when the phrase "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" became popular, I think from the mid-90s all the way through to even 2010s there has been a similar sentiment with large, multinational consulting companies. These consulting companies know they have a strong reputation for large scale, enterprise software projects, and so they will milk margins by charging high rates, upselling all sorts of additional features, and fulfilling projects with the lowest cost resources, whether it'd be outsourcing overseas, utilizing H1-B workers, or bringing in recent college grads. (Accenture is probably one of the most notorious for this -- not sure if they still do this now, but back in the early 2000s, they were known for bringing in college grads from all sorts of usually non-STEM majors, and they would put them through a 2-week bootcamp (er "Core Analyst Training") out in St. Charles, where more focus was on the partying and hooking up than anything else, but then shortly afterword, they'd be put on projects where they'd be expected to do technical design and even coding, while being billed out at $180+/hour) Now, in all fairness, for every highly publicized, disastrous rollout that one of these companies gets notoriety for, there are actually still dozens of much less public, relatively successful implementations that gets deployed without any issue or fanfare. But despite this, the costs for even the successful projects are still ridiculously high. As the main reason for their huge margins are primarily in their reputations, then as their reputations continue to erode from things like this news piece, clients will start to wonder if the large costs can continue to be justified. And I'm beginning to see this sentiment directly -- my small dozen-person consulting company has not only been able to compete directly against these larger companies, but we have started winning contracts against them as well. For the latest contract we won, we bid at about 20% of what one of the larger companies ended up coming in at -- they actually thought they were a shoe-in because they were the incumbent, having built out several other projects already for the client. But we ended up being selected not just because of our pricing, but because of our overall proposal, favorable terms and expertise on the domain. What's even more surprising is that even though we offered "bargain basement" pricing relative to theirs, it will still end up being the most profitable project we have had to-date -- it just makes it crazy to think what kind of profits/margins that they can make.

Zenst 6y ago

> At 44 million, you can hire 146 engineers each paid 300k for a full year Maybe they did and the too many chefs to cooks ratio played out, seen and experienced that.

nojito 6y ago

Liability and integration causes bloated costs. The bigger issue is that it’s a no bid contract. However there’s no real process for verifying individuals who bid in a timely way.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I work in defense and I always say the govt pays $100 for $1 of actual work. It makes me pretty angry at times as a taxpayer. The worst part is that we know government software contracts are done completely wrong but the government doesn't want to change. Too much money to be made.

option 6y ago

this just smells corruption. Plain and simple, alas happens not only in “3rd world countries”

Romanulus 6y ago

Deloitte held a big govt. contract back when I worked there back in the day... long story short, they had a strong track record of providing the worst service, a terrible product, and was ultimately made a very bad reputation for themselves as time went on (through the local media, etc).

tootie 6y ago

Aside from all the other answers, it would cost you millions to hire and onboard 146 qualified engineers. A place like Deloitte can drop them on your doorstep with a week's notice. They also have all the product design, strategy, and organization layers required to stand up the equivalent of mid-size enterprise from scratch really quickly and then tear it all back down a year later. I've worked in this business for smaller agencies and we could absolutely work miracles for stodgy organizations. My biggest account probably took in $20M all told and I'd say we earned every penny and launched a really successful product really quickly. Failures can happen too and they're usually a lot more complicated than just incompetent developers. It's just as likely the client is unable to articulate need accurately and corners get cut.

ryanSrich 6y ago

These deals are mostly to help out friends and line pockets. Building something that works doesn’t even matter. Government contracting is one of the biggest scams happening in broad daylight.

jmeister 6y ago

They needed to hire somebody better. Palantir would probably have gotten it done for much lesser, faster.

adamjb 6y ago

Divide that number by 3-5, for starters. Charge out rates are multiples of salaries.

thegeekpirate 6y ago

FWIW, feel free to take a look at this contract from the BC government for a centralized education website (http://docs.openinfo.gov.bc.ca/D29078314A_Response_Package_EDU-2013-00142.PDF http://docs.openinfo.gov.bc.ca/D29078314A_Response_Package_E...). This is what it looks like (https://i.imgur.com/fmUVYhG.png https://i.imgur.com/fmUVYhG.png), and for comparison, here is the old website (https://i.imgur.com/IW5J9gS.png https://i.imgur.com/IW5J9gS.png). This is projected to cost 95 million dollars over 12 years. Yep.

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jiggawatts 6y ago

Let me try to explain using analogies. Organisations are like people. Their culture is like someone's personality. Dealing with easygoing people is much smoother than paranoid delusional people with OCD. In the same way, dealing with government agencies is difficult because their corporate culture -- their personality -- is not what most people would categorise as normal. These deals aren't normal deals. They're the equivalent of specialist treatment for someone with mental problems. Take for example an organisation like SpaceX: They simply do things. If some manager goes to Elon with a rational but inherently risky proposal, he'll weigh the risk and then more than likely give the goahead. Other companies have a lower risk appetite, but they will take occasional risks. Sometimes huge ones. Large federal government organisations are the diametric opposite of this kind of agile, low-overhead, no-bullshit private company. Their appetite for risk is precisely zero. That's difficult for people to wrap their head around. It's like a superconductor. It's not just a "really good conductor". It's not a "little better than copper". No, it's something fundamentally different. This kind of zero tolerance squeezes out entire lines of thought, just like a superconductor expels a magnetic field. Notice how in this article the blame is on Deloitte and the "problem" is that there was a failure. This isn't a fault, this is the system working precisely as designed. Nobody will get fired for picking Deloitte, their purpose all along was to take the blame for the low-low price of a mere $44M so that a government employee making $100K won't have to have a couple of uncomfortable meetings. The problem isn't that there was a failure, that happens all the time with software projects. The problem is that risk in government agencies is managed by people with essentially infinite source of free money that they can draw down on in order to protect themselves. If a magic genie gave you a million dollars every week to spend on your own safety with no strings attached, wouldn't you? Would you say "no"? Really?

timmy-turner 6y ago
Reading "Let me try to explain using analogies.", I was worried someone would come up with another car anology. Seeing orgs as people with characters, oh my, my eyes are opened now. Sounds weird but it makes sense the few times that I have worked on contracted projects. For me, an added complexity in gauging the other side of the contract is that their personality changes depending on the actual people that are involved. When some higher-ups join the project it in later stages, the personality may turns even more mental than it already is.

codpiece 6y ago

I noticed a Salesforce blue cloud favicon when I interacted with the system.

tyingq 6y ago
Yep... "The vaccine management solution is a mobile-ready application that is built on our existing GovConnect Salesforce platform." https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solutions/vaccine-management-system.html https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-sector/solution...

juskrey 6y ago

From time to time I am trying to crawl government procurement portals for projects, and dropping the idea after a couple of hours again and again: only proposal, initial negotiation and documentation will probably require several people full time, this is even before any project movements.. Mind that, this it's the system where you're bidding for months for a project, and even if you have won and was good at delivery, you will be doing all the rounds for the next one again. So governments, sort of meaning to drive the price down via tenders, in reality are paying for all the losing bids too, and paying a lot.

Cd00d 6y ago

Your point stands, but a nitpick - don't forget overhead. You should roughly double engineer salary to cover overhead, so it's 146 engs at 150k (still good), or 75 engs at 300. Either way, the deal should be possible.

tvon 6y ago

It is not a tech problem, it is a people problem.

ddingus 6y ago

And the government can own the code, publish, and as the site finishes up, that team can proceed to apply all they learned and built to other pressing tasks. A decade of that, and a whole lot of government would be awesome. Of course, these arguments have been made many times. Money in politics prevents it. I have presented them. I have watched large donations and a couple nice dinners make the whole idea go away. :(

WalterBright 6y ago

I once hired a company to do some structural repairs. The company usually did contract work for the government. Some weeks went by. I was billed a progress payment of $5000, but the company hadn't actually accomplished anything - just reviews, several site visits, meetings, evaluations, memos, emails and constant reassignments of who was working on it. I fired them and refused to pay their bill (they hadn't even produced a plan for how they were going to proceed). Hired another outfit, who did the entire job front to back for $5000, and got it done in a couple weeks.

bredren 6y ago

This is the same old argument used against Burning Man org’s ticketing system.

3327 6y ago

Deloitte should be investigated for defrauding tax payers

vncecartersknee 6y ago

I used to have a few friends who worked at deloitte as analysts I'd often catch up with them for lunch or after work drinks and I can guarantee you this was most likely made by a bunch of coked out 22 year olds working until 3am every night for a couple of months It reminded me of a university style group project, constantly astonished that they’d turn over a few 10's of thousands of lines of python code that (usually) some government department was paying millions for. Not to smear my friends who worked there who must have to work incredibly hard given the conditions and the stress they were under, I always suspected their code must have been absolutely riddled with bugs, and I shuddered to think what it must have been like for the next poor grads who had to work on it after them. And it was always some project where I was amazed there wasn't already some mature software out there that accomplished what they were doing anyway. But anyway they seemed to have fun so whatever

bhouston 6y ago

I believe Deloitte just PMs the project and farms it out to a sub contractor. This is standard operating procedure. I understand the Deloitte prefers heavily documented and waterfall development with overseas developers doing the work. Basically top heavy and expensive management and cheap dev resources.

CraigJPerry 6y ago

Those would be public employees, the argument is you’d be crowding out private enterprise. Government should be small goes the argument.

KorematsuFred 6y ago

Oh my sweet summer child, thou has not seen the internal working of government contracts. In order to qualify to even bid on a contract there is a pretty high entry barrier. The amount of time it will take you to cross that barrier would be more than amount of time it will take you to start a real business. Bidding is another expensive process which costs money. If you bid on 10 contracts in a year and win one the cost of bidding on rest 9 contracts must be covered to the won contract. Then comes the compliance costs of various government regulations. In a startup world you can take up accessibility as a P2 item but in government contracts it is a P0. So there are all these complexities involved which bloat the contract. Government has passed probably thousand regulations on whom you can hire and how you work, where the data is stored and what kind of background verification you have done on your employees. Of course if you and I were to develop a similar website we could do it for $4M and spare some cash to buy couple of Ferraris. PS. There is also bribes. Of course these are never called so but you have to spend good amount of time golfing with right people, throwing parties, offering front row seats to NBA finals and those sort of things to get your files moving.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

My first IT job was with a hosting company that noticed how much the goverment contracts were bloated. They then spent ages trying to become an offical supplier so they could undercut companies charging so much more. Literally, one of the issues they had was that so many people were curious as to how the company could make a profit since the prices were so much lower than all the other contractors like Serco. We also ended up being in contact with Serco about a tender they had to redo one of the goverment websites. We ended up not getting any work from that because Serco was under pressure to stop outsourcing all their contracts. Goverment contracts just send lots of money to companies who already have lots of money.

barrkel 6y ago
Serco
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  Thanks, I've updated it with the correct spelling.

atlgator 6y ago

The 44M is most likely over 5 years. Knowing Deloitte generally comes in on the high side of pricing I'd say it's around a 37 person team, cross functional including PMs, BAs, developers, testers, devops, Section 508 compliance, IA, user support.

atlgator 6y ago

It's Time and Materials/staff aug contracting - meaning Deloitte isn't selling an end product, they are selling staff on a per hour basis. As with other types of contracting, the hourly rate has a huge markup on it to cover indirect costs as well as profit. They make a lot less profit than you think though. Most of it is indirect costs.

ohnoesoes 6y ago

explain that to WAANK managers