10 ms·

If it really did cost over half a billion dollars for only 50k parallel connections, that is outrageous. It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown,

• JPKab 13y ago
  It is truly an awful scenario. As I stated recently in a comment on this subject, Federal contracting is a Rent Seeking scenario: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking I have a weird role: I work at a company which does tons of Federal contracts, but also has lots of private sector work. I keep my sanity by doing short term consulting with private clients. There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. Winning a contract is EVERYTHING. It is a writing contest, and you can be sure that the Federal contract officer knows jack shit about the actual fundamentals of the project. The Contract Officer is a paper pusher whose job is to look at the line items in the Request for Proposal, and examine which company's proposal best "hits" each line item. And of course they will select a low bidder, which often is a bid too low for the company to even profit, simply meant to get their foot in the door. The staffing of these Federal contracts is horrific. You get entire teams of "change management" people. I'm currently assisting on a personnel system for a major military organization. I recently had to witness an entire discussion by the change management team on removing hyphens from a particular term to help the branding. I almost threw up in my mouth. The people I work with on the Fed contracts, in general, don't touch technology when they leave work. Therefore the only browser they use is IE8 (according to the customer org, it is more secure......) they do nothing outside of J2EE/.NET (usually just one of the two) and they HAVE/WILL never build a website that supports more than 5,000 enterprise users (concurrently). It is incredibly easy to look like a wizard amongst this bunch, but the experience of the Federal world has made me avoid these projects like the plague. The incentives at the business level (and therefore the high salary jobs) are ALL for winning contracts. Performing well on the work won is just viewed as another cost center.
  • dfc 13y ago
    There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful. What are you referring to with "it"? The folks at your company who do federal IT work? Government IT employees? Federal IT consulting?
    • dfxm12 13y ago
      the parent post seems to be referring to bidding for & working with the federal government on government contracts.
      • dfc 13y ago
        The sentence is: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side, but it really is awful." The "it" section is after the comma and not part of its own sentence. Maybe you could (I wouldn't) make that inference if it read: "There are some sharp people working the Federal side. But it really is awful."
        • enoch_r 13y ago
          It's similar to the sentence "Bob got a new girlfriend, but she is awful." "It" refers to "the Federal side."
          • dfc 13y ago
            Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
    • cowsandmilk 13y ago
      I read "it" as a pronoun, not as "information technology"
      • dfc 13y ago
        Me too, I just can not figure out what the pronoun refers to. I am not sure why my request for clarification was down voted. I appreciated the comment and wanted to make sure I understood everything the OP was saying.
• smackfu 13y ago
  >It is hard to read/understand that spending breakdown, not sure what each 20-50 million dollar allotment is exactly for It's probably just a single contract with milestones that correspond to payments. Like "completed design" means they get 10%.
• 001sky 13y ago
  for only 50k parallel connections Its hard to win when you set the goals like this (low), too
• Shivetya 13y ago
  It cost 55.7 to launch the site, the six hundred million dollar number is the total of all their contracts.