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No, this is not cynical enough. Even the part you mentioned: 'wrangling data for legacy systems' does not cost that much, it's still a small piece of the pie.
by jariel 6y ago
No, this is not cynical enough.
Even the part you mentioned: 'wrangling data for legacy systems' does not cost that much, it's still a small piece of the pie.
The 'bulk of it' goes to sales, BD, marketing, profits, layers of excess management, specialist consultants, accountants and lawyers.
This contract is an example of 'modern world graft'.
Healtchare.gov cost $1-2 Billion and it was also a mess until Google Engineers came in to save it.
Software is not like Construction where the costs can at least be well estimated and you don't need geniuses.
It's frankly very depressing and this kind of graft and stupidity is all over the system.
There are actually not that many people who are both: 1) technically/project competent enough to figure it out and 2) have enough gravitas on the business side to make proper bids. Partly that's the fault of government.
To be fair, it's also bad buyers who change requirements all over the place and throw projects in dispensary often for what are ultimately political reasons.
It's a real failure of leadership.
- raverbashing 6y ago> 'wrangling data for legacy systems' does not cost that much, it's still a small piece of the pie Are you sure? Because I think it might possibly involve: - interfacing with an old COBOL system - interfacing with an old DB2/ORACLE/(legacy database) with a "very creative" Schema and even more creative indexes (or maybe none - who knows). More bonus points if it's not even ASCII encoded - Production system runs on a VM serving an old classic ASP or PHP app - Data can be exported through an XML from Hell but that takes 2h to export.
- JimBlizz 6y agoYou forgot the step where you even need to identify that these things already exist, and whats in them. Are there governance requirements around the data in them? I'm not familiar with US law, but we're talking about PII in this example so what legal and privacy hoops need jumping to copy the data? Thats before we get to "Can an person with this specific learning disability, or a person who doesn't have a fixed address navigate through this form?"
- nitrogen 6y agoI've done some of those, 90% by myself, for a modern ecommerce site for a 150-year-old company on a 30-year-old Oracle DB.
- lordnacho 6y ago> Software is not like Construction where the costs can at least be well estimated and you don't need geniuses. Construction is notorious for cost overruns?
- jariel 6y agoYes, but measurable, understandable outcomes. And when it goes way over, it's usually easy to identify the problems, it's just often politically infeasible to address them. With construction - the numbers are on the table. And FYI - aside from massive project, municipalities and construction is happening all the time. There usually are not massive overruns for such projects.