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Census Bureau's American FactFinder software cost taxpayers $33.3 million

• Mizza 14y ago
  Awesome! I wrote the original FOIA that he references in the beginning of this article, I'm extremely pleased that somebody else took the same initiative! Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.
  • wmhartnett 14y ago
    Thanks for the inspiration! As someone just said on Twitter, "we really should just FOIA the cost of everything with a .gov, just for fun."
    • morisy 14y ago
      Hmm, that might be our next big campaign after we get our Drone project a little more under control ...
    • Mizza 14y ago
      As much as I'd love to do that, I think casting a broad net in FOIA is very difficult and potentially counterproductive. FOIA offices have very limited resources already, so asking for literally everything at once or as lots of little requests performs a DoS attack on the one office of the government that I really like! It does make a good point philosophically, but practically, I think it might be counterproductive. The FOIA law itself also requires requests to be fairly specific. I bet there are some _specific_ things that members of this community want to know (cost/sources of software, policy memos, etc.) that could be requested, received and processed in a more timely and useful fashion than if we just asked for "(asterisk).(asterisk)".
      • freehunter 14y ago
        Or a better solution, everything that's eligible for a FOIA request should just be made available on the existing Open Government page [1] rather than making people request it and go through the process. What is the point of this security by obscurity nonsense? If it can be released under FOIA, there's no reason to not release it without a FOIA request. [1] http://www.whitehouse.gov/open http://www.whitehouse.gov/open
        • Mizza 14y ago
          You're preaching to the choir, man! :) My MuckRock username is 'TransparentByDefault' for a reason! :) https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/user/TransparentByDefault/ https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/user/TransparentByDefault/
        • sliverstorm 14y ago
          there's no reason to not release it without a FOIA request. How about the cost of digging up that information? Or the effort to ensure each piece of information released is indeed safe for release? Or the effort to put it all together in a coherent set? The government has a TON of records. Releasing them is not as simple as picking the "public" checkbox in the settings pane. There might also be a general concern that if someone had access to the entire database of records, they could mine that database and start to infer other information that is not supposed to be known. This sort of tactic has been used in wars past. Compiling supply chain records to infer troop movements, for example.
          • specialist 14y ago
            I accidently upvoted you. So please mentally -1 for this post. I'd characterize your reply as concern trolling. I've done my share of FOIA requests. I imagine I've heard most every excuse. Including "We lost the backup tapes." Being charitable, the reason public records requests are hard, expensive to fulfill is because efficient records management is rare, making finding and retrieval difficult. Someone may chime in suggesting CMS, workflow, sharepoint, whatever. Yea. If it was just that easy, everyone would be doing it.
    • anigbrowl 14y ago
      I'm waiting for someone to close the loop by complaining about the cost of FOIA compliance as a contributor to overall project cost.
  • danso 14y ago
    Wow. I remember when you first posted that original FOIA, how me (and others) were saying, we should FOIA EVERY APP...maybe someone did. But I hadn't seen a reference to the crappy OSHA app until this post.
• jevinskie 14y ago
  I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!
  • GFischer 14y ago
    Well, the company I work for has quotes from both CSC and Guidewire for their insurance packages (kind of an ERP for insurance companies), which would handle all of our processes, and they ran in the "tens of millions" category between licensing, implantation and other costs. You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :) Guidewire at least has hundreds of people working on their insurance suite, some of then I've written to sound very capable and I really like their development process. They even created their own language based on the JVM (Gosu). http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/ http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/ I'm sure CSC has some equally good people, but I haven't come across them :)
    • JPKab 14y ago
      CSC was the prime contractor for the Air Force's attempt at an ERP. 5 years and $1 billion later, there is no ERP to speak of.
      • GFischer 14y ago
        Good thing we didn't go with them, then :) . Personally, I thought Guidewire fit our needs very well (but I'm at the very bottom of the totem pole).
  • debacle 14y ago
    300 man-years of development is crazy huge for almost any software project I can think of.
    • smackfu 14y ago
• pcrh 14y ago
  Interesting use of the gif there. I wonder if there will be a migration of these gifs from meme-based humor sites to more "legitimate" blogs and news sites. They are, after all, the visual equivalent to using quotes by famous people.
  • wmhartnett 14y ago
    No one has ever accused me of being legitimate. There was an animated GIF on The New York Times homepage just the other day, though.
  • alexismadrigal 14y ago
    Sheeeit. We've had animated gifs on TheAtlantic.com HOMEPAGE since like 2011.
    • pcrh 14y ago
      Well... ain't that a thing! But, seriously, someone is going to write a thesis on gifs one day. It is "literally" an innovation in communications. While we currently associate gifs with memes, etc, you can see quite a few very creative ones on ffffound.com, for example. And,as you say, TheAtlantic now uses them.
  • wmhartnett 14y ago
    Then there is Hyperwocky, of course: http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hyperwocky/indexhyper.html http://partners.nytimes.com/library/cyber/hyperwocky/indexhy...
• HotKFreshSwag 14y ago
  Does anyone know what something similar would cost a large private corporation?
  • slurgfest 14y ago
    That may depend on whether that large private corporation is already running the US Census. Hopefully that day will never come, it is enough that corporations are running the prisons. I would also like to know how much said private corporation would charge. (But I don't have to wonder very much, because companies like Elsevier and Lexis/Nexis give a pretty good idea)
  • _delirium 14y ago
    Probably not a very different price, and the end result might not be much better. Bespoke enterprise software is notoriously expensive, and the end results are often not good. Lots of reasons, many the same as with government: client has very particular needs, client has unclear specifications that are changed several times during the process, competition for the bid is weak, client doesn't have their internal shit together, client's existing systems that the new stuff must integrate with are poorly designed and/or bitrotting and/or broken, client's management/billing/procedures are so bureaucratic that you have to include some cost in the bid just to pay for that, etc. I haven't done anything in that area myself, but from what I hear second-hand it's a gravy train once you've made a sale to a Fortune500 company. Sales is hard, but once you've made the sale, you can bill millions for years for all sorts of reasons, some of which are even legitimate (given what they're asking you to do).
  • jsnk 14y ago
    It's probably in the similar range, but private companies are private. They have no obligation to anyone other than stockholders.
    • _delirium 14y ago
      I agree that makes it worse, but if indeed it'd cost similar at a large private company, it's not clear how we'd expect the government to do better. If the private sector can't manage to bring down costs on enterprise software, why would the government be able to get a better deal than they could? I would be interested in how software for large organizations, public or private, could suck less. A handful of startups have attempted to disrupt enterprise markets, but the going seems tough.
• carson 14y ago
  From the site in question: "American FactFinder works with Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. Other browsers may not perform as expected. " I wonder what it would cost to get support for Chrome.
• JPKab 14y ago
  The software is a "steaming pile of shit"? Of course, it was built by IBM Federal. Building software for U.S. gov't contractors is an awful, awful experience. The end result is the talented leave as soon as they can, because working in a red tape environment with ridiculous Information Assurance (that's gov't speak for their own ludicrous security theater that is their IT security process) policies makes you want to kill yourself. My wife has a friend who barely made it out of high school, believes in psychics, believes that the U.S. gives an annual payment to England for our freedom (this was revealed on the 4th. I spit out my beer laughing, but then I realized she was serious). This person works as an Information Assurance person in charge of making sure software is "secure." She knows nothing about software, but she has passed a few tests, courtesy of prep courses which guarantee you can get the cert. Because she was in the Air Force for 6 months (she got pregnant and was honorably discharged a couple of months after her first duty), she is a veteran and is therefore fully qualified to classify software as secure. Or in reality, defense contractors have to meet quotas for hiring veterans, and they put her in the easiest butts in seats job they could find, IT security. This, my friends, is the system you have to deal with in the federal fucking government.
  • jcromartie 14y ago
    He was calling the OSHA heat app "a steamy pile of shit".
  • wpietri 14y ago
    I'm sure that IBM Federal is as bad as you suggest. But part of that is due to how government works, which is in turn due to how citizens react to things. Think about it like a government employee. If you do your job perfectly well, nobody notices. Despite the bureaucracy, despite unclear success criteria, despite insane budgeting. Nobody notices. That's just what's expected. When something goes wrong, though, you get hammered. God help you if something comes to the attention of the public or makes the news. Nobody will take the time to understand the context; everybody just looks for the most plausible person to blame. If that's you, then you've got a black mark for the rest of your career. Welcome to the basement! It's the total opposite of a startup context. And in some ways it should be. But it does mean that government projects drown in red tape and politics and procedures up the wazoo. Which is absolutely a recipe for shitty software and overpriced contracts, whether you're in government or a megacorp. I'm in startups for a reason, and I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the good people who keep plugging away in government despite the fucked-up incentives.
• jcromartie 14y ago
  On the other hand, we're doing some public-sector development, and it's fixed-cost and the end result will be public domain.
  • sp332 14y ago
    Maybe you're just not very good at negotiating?
• slurgfest 14y ago
  That figure is clearly not for an Android app, that is a clear misrepresentation. Who knows how it breaks down. This exposes a vast amount of queryable census data to the public (something which would normally be regarded as a good thing, particularly if you are a startup which uses data). But, to be sure, we can just punish the government for ever releasing any data unless it had such a high fee attached that only huge corporations could afford to pay it. You should FOIA some kind of itemization of how that huge number breaks down, rather than running to the press with a sensationalized version tailored more to partisan politics than to informing the public
  • jcromartie 14y ago
    Who said the Android app cost $33M?
  • schwanksta 14y ago
    You misread the post. He didn't query data about an Android app. You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Please, hire me for your next job. And I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ireapps/census https://github.com/ireapps/census
    • crusso 14y ago
      > You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Apparently, he/she does. I really wish I could understand why, though. Government corruption and waste hurts us all. Why do some people blow it off so easily?
      • deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      • jbooth 14y ago
        Yeah, they should just have private subcontractors handle this stuff. Like IBM Federal or someone.
• aggronn 14y ago
  This is disgusting. I've had to use it extensively for research, and while it 'gets the job done', its such a pain to use. I've asked myself who put this together, and I always assumed it was a team of interns working across a decade for each version. I can't believe this is the best they could do for $33 million. I just can't. They better have some slick stuff under the hood.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • wpietri 14y ago
    Good UI comes from collaboration and iteration with users. Apple did something like 100 iterations on the first iPod. Typical consumer electronics companies do 3 to 5. The government RFP and budgeting process is practically designed to prevent iteration and exploration. I can just hear Senator Blowhard of Cornhusk now: "So you want an unknown amount of money to keep building things until users are happy? That's an obvious boondoggle. Come back with a complete specification and put it out for bids from major contractors. We must be responsible with every penny of taxpayer money. Harrumph!" So of course the software has terrible usability. Anything built like that will be terrible.
    • mbesto 14y ago
      > Apple did something like 100 iterations on the first iPod. I don't doubt you, but do you have a reference for this?
      • wpietri 14y ago
        For the Apple figure, I'm pretty sure it was Inside Steve's Brain. This was some years back and I'm away from my books, though. I'm sure it was 100 iterations on some Apple device, but I won't swear it was the iPod. The 3-5 number I got from a consumer electronics designer I took a class with.
    • crusso 14y ago
      Yeah, and for $33M they couldn't build in some iterations and bring in focus groups or hire someone competent to get it at least partially right the first time? These projects are handed out to reward the connected contractors, contributors and lobbyists that know how to work their target politicians and bureaucrats. There are ZERO incentives to do quality work. No one will lose his job over this software travesty. No one will get demoted. Rather than bemoan the waste of $32.9M on the job, politicians will simply push for higher taxes.
• TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
  Can somebody explain please what makes FactFinder so horrible (well, aside it was made by the federal govt)?
• cobrien 14y ago
  I haven't researched the full contract award or pulled a copy of the original RFP, however, work on the Census FactFinder website was part of an $89.5mm contract awarded to IBM Federal in 2007 (for, potentially, 9 years) [1]. I wonder if the $33mm quoted in the FOIA request response is the total cost incurred to-date on that award (including services performed for the entire Statement of Work) rather than the actual cost of ONLY building/updating FactFinder. I wouldn't be surprised if the $33mm price is correct ... but not 100% sure it is without spending more time looking around and, potentially, seeking further information through FOIA. [1] http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22467.wss http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22467.wss
  • wmhartnett 14y ago
    Good point, and thanks for digging that up.
• laironald 14y ago
  This isn't surprising. I've done work in the federal government. Recently we built some products that did more, looked better and cost far less ($200k) than the other big name consultants. Our risk for further funding is that it didn't cost enough although most people love what we've done. The federal government IT market works on a contracting model, which means the people working under the system do things at a minimum OR do things to ensure that they'll receive further funding down the line. It's incredibly time consuming and difficult to nail one of these contracts (usually requires a combination of relationship building, slow moving people and lots and lots of politics) so once you get into that zone, the incentive for the contractor is to layer as much stuff into the contract as possible.
  • crusso 14y ago
    Yet when anyone talks about cutting a dime out of the federal budget, the cries of "You're starving poor people!" and such dominate the political discussions. There isn't even a little bit of common sense or honesty in the way the government spends our money and people wonder why some of us are so adamantly opposed to raising taxes.
    • _delirium 14y ago
      This doesn't really seem like a public/private difference, but an enterprise/non-enterprise difference: Fortune500 firms are no more efficient than government contracting is, really. While it's a lot in other contexts, $33m for a custom enterprise software project, even one that seems like it ought to cost much less, is pretty middle-of-the-road as a price.
      • cjy 14y ago
        Really, you think this would have cost $33M if a Fortune 500 firm was paying? Enterprises overpay a little because managers are spending shareholders money. Governments overpay a lot because bureaucrats are spending tax payers money. There is a lot less accountability in the latter.
• character 14y ago
  Seems like a similar situation to the student info system at my school, which supposedly cost $8 million of our tuition money despite its terrible UI (scrollbars inside scollbars inside scollbars) and inability to store three-digit course numbers (making the entire university have to switch to four-digit course numbers).
• jashkenas 14y ago
  For folks interested in helping solve the root cause of these sorts of things ... the White House is looking for people to help build a streamlined procurement process: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfpez http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfpez ... hopefully making it possible for vendors build government web projects with bids for less than $150k, instead of millions of dollars per web site.
  • tomjen3 14y ago
    Sorry, but for a hacker streamlining procurement procedures sounds like a huge and extreemly boring timesink. Wouldn't this be something an mba would love anyway?
    • jashkenas 14y ago
      Some folks might consider it a boring timesink. But it also happens to be the important meta-problem that stands between us and increased government transparency and accessibility. Take almost any government data set, request / report interface, tax service, or help center you can imagine. It's very hard to believe that we'll ever have a quality online version without first fixing the procurement process.
    • nine_k 14y ago
      If you are a citizen and want to make federal government more effective and less expensive, why not?
    • wpietri 14y ago
      I think it would be something awesome to work on. I'm in software to make a difference, and dropping a digit or two off the cost of government projects could be quite an impact.
      • BHSPitMonkey 14y ago
        More money to allocate to the defense budget!
• danso 14y ago
  On a positive note... I don't know how much it cost to redesign the Federal Register, but federalregister.gov is one of the most usable, data-intensive sites around. Especially compared to what it used to be. GAO.gov is also a hallmark in usability and information-taxonomy.
  • knowtheory 14y ago
    One of the dudes who developed the Federal Register site (i think as a code for america fellow) is now at AirBnB too. This is a world we can and should get involved in. Ah i wasn't quite right. You can check out the full story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839137 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839137 sunlight labs was involved though.
  • sharkweek 14y ago
    several friends took jobs with the GAO out of school (data analysis type gigs) -- they have some of the coolest stuff to talk about; seems like a great branch of government to work for
• cdk 14y ago
  For simplicity let's say that IBM charges $300/hr for a consultant (developer/PM/etc). That would be about 100,000 hours of work. Let's say a consultant bills 2,000 hours a year and it takes them 18-24 months to build this thing. That would be a team of 25-30 (developers, PMs, account managers, etc). The time frame is realistic considering poor original design, scope creep and federal government counterparts not being particularly quick in gettings things done (getting access/fighting through bureaucracy, etc). So why would the federal government hire IBM over you; who can build a totally bug free version of this in half the time for half the price? IBM is: - Not likely go out of business anytime soon. - Not be unavailable for support work because you decided to start/join a startup - Not be able to deal with turnover since they have 100k+ employees, steady stream of college recruits and have been around for 100 years.
  • wpietri 14y ago
    And you forgot the most important part. If the project goes to shit, people can say, "But we hired IBM!" If the government employee in charge hires a smaller company that does just as well as IBM would have, then everybody yells at the government employee.
• scarmig 14y ago
  If you're interested in making actually good software for the government, an agency that looks like it's genuinely dedicated to that end is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. http://www.consumerfinance.gov/jobs/design-technology-fellows http://www.consumerfinance.gov/jobs/design-technology-fellow... For their Design + Technology Fellowship, the deadline is this Friday. You can complain about how government does things, or you can do something to fix it.
• unreal37 14y ago
  Working in a big corporate environment which I feel is similar to the way the government must work, you must understand that the "cost to develop the application" does not mean what you think it means. It's not the "cost of the development phase". Coming up with the idea and getting it approved takes months. Wrapped into the project of creating the web site will be the "what should we create" phase and dozens of iterations on design and IA, which takes most of the work. There will be 20+ people involved in this process and one line of code hasn't even been written for the first 6 months of the project. The idea they had last week is different than the idea they are talking about this week, which will be different than the idea they will talk about next week. Imagine this goes on for 6 months. Once the code is written, testing, security, infrastructure setup and all the sign-offs on that also takes months. One person full time for a year will cost IBM $250,000 in real costs (salary, benefits, overhead) that they bill out to the Federal Government at $500,000 per person per year. Can I imagine 25 people working on this for one year, where only 3 of them are developers? And the rest of the money is hard costs and infrastructure? Yes I can. Easily. Sad though.
  • bobbles 14y ago
    Generally (in Australia anyway) government software also has to meet a series of strict accessibility guidelines before it is considered complete. Things like high-contrast modes, adjustable font sizes, naming conventions (for screen readers, etc) all have to be taken into account on EVERY dialog.
    • adestefan 14y ago
      That's called Section 508 compliance in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Rehabilitation_Act_of_1973 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...
• DanielBMarkham 14y ago
  It's really hard to overstate how bad the government is at software development. I've worked in several contracts with various agencies, and I know people who still stay in the game, and the best ones I've seen are ten years behind everybody else and spending about 50x what they should to get things done. They're simply swamped in bureaucratic molasses. For instance, even though the "business" of the government (things like tax collection or tracking shipping containers) uses much less data than say a Google does, not only do they have a CIO, they have an entire battalion of CIOs. There's a whole club of just government CIOs. Each of those, of course, has a full staff. When contracts are paid, it usually goes through some completely different set of people than the people who actually receive the value. If you're a company trying to help the government, you'd laugh your ass off if it weren't so damned sad. Your programmers -- and you gotta love this -- are all considered little cardboard cutouts, like cookies. If you have a problem to solve, the correct answer isn't what technology you would use to solve it. Usually that's outside your control anyway. The correct answer is how many "standard" programmers it would take to get it done. The quality of a "standard" programmer varies, but it's usually somebody with a few weeks of training and a desire to be anywhere but here. Many times your government partners are incompetent and a danger to themselves and others when it comes to technology. They want the moon but they don't want to take any political risk at all. I had one guy just flat out tell me: you guys make all the tough choices and if it goes well I'll take all the credit. If it fails it's all your fault. At least he was honest. I could go on, but I don't want to get into a rant. Ever wonder how the IRS spent billions on upgrades with nothing to show for it? Or how the FBI's new case management system was a total Charlie Foxtrot? Geesh. 33.3 million is getting off lucky.
  • yen223 14y ago
    Ex-employee of Accenture here. Accenture basically earns most of their money selling horrendously overpriced "solutions" to customers who don't care about cost. The thing is, the bureaucracy that you mentioned, it's not just the government. Too many large companies, especially non-IT ones, assume that you can complete a project by throwing 100 mediocre programmers at it.
    • DanielBMarkham 14y ago
• ameasure 14y ago
  I have 2 theories for why this happens: 1) The people drawing up these contracts know nothing about software. They are often non-technical, elderly, upper-management types that have never written a line of code in their life. For all they know, adding a link to a webpage is a 2 week project. 2) Congress punishes federal agencies for not spending all of their budget each year by cutting their budgets. As a result, towards the end of the fiscal year every federal agency goes on a crap buying spree to make sure they've spent every last penny.
• benthumb 14y ago
  My calculations give me approx $0.29 / household... I'm not sure I understand the fuss.
  • benthumb 14y ago
    AND if IBM Federal built it, why is the government being blamed exclusively... government incompetence is an overhyped meme.