4 ms·

I'm curious if this really surprises anyone here that the entire process for the government purchasing three mobile applications (Android, iOS, and BB) was ~200

by jsight 15y ago

I'm curious if this really surprises anyone here that the entire process for the government purchasing three mobile applications (Android, iOS, and BB) was ~200k. This seems pretty ordinary/normal to me.

altrego99 15y ago
Great... how can be one to help the government with such requirements?
altrego99 15y ago
Great... how can I be one to help the government with such requirements?
cobrausn 15y ago
Actually, me and a team of two other developers recently applied for a government contract for the NIST that would have had us fixing a bug in OpenSceneGraph that was causing it to perform worse when more graphics cards were added. Due to what they were asking for and the amount of time we thought it would take to accomplish it and provide the documentation they were asking for, we bid in at $60,000. We did not get the bid. I believe it was given to a university in Florida (damn grad students!) for a bid of $42,000. In regards to the Android app in question, I think they just didn't have enough bidders. It's also possible they bogged them down in paperwork and status reports / updates (tends to happen with government contracts) which drove up the cost. I am a bit bothered that the bidding system does not favor companies based in the US that are not owned by foreign companies.
- gte910h 15y ago
  >and provide the documentation they were asking for, People who've never worked on government contracts cannot conceive of the reporting and documentation projects. I've been on several (govt) projects where we spent as much time writing as doing.
  - danso 15y ago
    But what's the quality expectation on the reporting and documentation? Is it likely that your audience (the gov't managers) have lower standards?
    - gte910h 15y ago
      They not only expected very high quality with lots of thoroughness, they also wanted very specific formatting and types of sections, etc. Because they're the government, they often overspecify to not get taken advantage of.
bambax 15y ago
Yes. Doing business with the Government means you have to spend endless hours in meetings and produce endless piles of paperwork. In small projects such as this one, overhead is probably around 90% of total cost. Incidentally, that's why auctioning small pieces of a larger project independently is probably not a good idea. Costs could in fact skyrocket: each part would have its own contract, negotiation process, meetings, forms, etc.
- seanalltogether 15y ago
  Precisely, I wouldn't try to get involved in a government contract for less then $100k, even if the final result was to produce a single document, because you're going to spend so much of your budget just navigating the waters.
AJ007 15y ago
In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses. Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site. Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same product among different buyers would not be so extreme in a capitalist marketplace.
- gcv 15y ago
  Neither the government nor large corporations qualify as the kind of free and ideal market you're referring to.
  - AJ007 15y ago
    How does the term "capitalist marketplace" infer "free and ideal market?" The purchase and sale of cocaine occurs in a market where virtually all sellers are capitalists. It is neither free nor ideal.
- VMG 15y ago
  > In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses. In the big corporations defense, they don't use tax dollars.
  - com 15y ago
    Yep - they use excess revenues from us, their customers, and don't even translate that into excess profits for us, their owners. Instead they use excess costs to reward us, their executives and us, their contractors. The difference between big business and big government are sometimes difficult for me to see.

by jsight 15y ago

altrego99 15y ago

Great... how can be one to help the government with such requirements?

altrego99 15y ago

Great... how can I be one to help the government with such requirements?

cobrausn 15y ago

Actually, me and a team of two other developers recently applied for a government contract for the NIST that would have had us fixing a bug in OpenSceneGraph that was causing it to perform worse when more graphics cards were added. Due to what they were asking for and the amount of time we thought it would take to accomplish it and provide the documentation they were asking for, we bid in at $60,000. We did not get the bid. I believe it was given to a university in Florida (damn grad students!) for a bid of $42,000. In regards to the Android app in question, I think they just didn't have enough bidders. It's also possible they bogged them down in paperwork and status reports / updates (tends to happen with government contracts) which drove up the cost. I am a bit bothered that the bidding system does not favor companies based in the US that are not owned by foreign companies.

gte910h 15y ago
>and provide the documentation they were asking for, People who've never worked on government contracts cannot conceive of the reporting and documentation projects. I've been on several (govt) projects where we spent as much time writing as doing.
- danso 15y ago
  But what's the quality expectation on the reporting and documentation? Is it likely that your audience (the gov't managers) have lower standards?
  - gte910h 15y ago
    They not only expected very high quality with lots of thoroughness, they also wanted very specific formatting and types of sections, etc. Because they're the government, they often overspecify to not get taken advantage of.

bambax 15y ago

Yes. Doing business with the Government means you have to spend endless hours in meetings and produce endless piles of paperwork. In small projects such as this one, overhead is probably around 90% of total cost. Incidentally, that's why auctioning small pieces of a larger project independently is probably not a good idea. Costs could in fact skyrocket: each part would have its own contract, negotiation process, meetings, forms, etc.

seanalltogether 15y ago
Precisely, I wouldn't try to get involved in a government contract for less then $100k, even if the final result was to produce a single document, because you're going to spend so much of your budget just navigating the waters.

AJ007 15y ago

In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses. Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site. Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same product among different buyers would not be so extreme in a capitalist marketplace.

gcv 15y ago
Neither the government nor large corporations qualify as the kind of free and ideal market you're referring to.
- AJ007 15y ago
  How does the term "capitalist marketplace" infer "free and ideal market?" The purchase and sale of cocaine occurs in a market where virtually all sellers are capitalists. It is neither free nor ideal.
VMG 15y ago
> In the governments defense, I think big corporations routinely overpay for web development and marketing expenses. In the big corporations defense, they don't use tax dollars.
- com 15y ago
  Yep - they use excess revenues from us, their customers, and don't even translate that into excess profits for us, their owners. Instead they use excess costs to reward us, their executives and us, their contractors. The difference between big business and big government are sometimes difficult for me to see.