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Strangely, based on the title I thought this was going to be about future startup trends. i.e. For the last 6 years or so we've seen a revolution in interface d

Strangely, based on the title I thought this was going to be about future startup trends. i.e. For the last 6 years or so we've seen a revolution in interface design as a competitive advantage when creating a new startup, but as the low hanging fruit opportunities are used up, as lot of the really meaty opportunities are going to be in software where there is a significant backend component performing a lot of heavy lifting and magic. I'm not in the least bit surprised to see that a lot of the work and resulting problems with healthcare.gov are on the backend. I just wish the government realized that we have all these amazing developers over in the Bay Area that can do a better job than the majority of those developers currently writing software for government contracts. I'm shocked no one in government has said to themselves "What do we have to do to make our software problems accessible to the types of engineers working at the Googles and Dropboxes of the world.

hga 13y ago
If you've ever done government contracting, you'd know as things stand now a large fraction of those "amazing developers" wouldn't put up with its insanities when they have good alternatives. E.g. would you be happy filling out time sheets for exactly 40 hours, no matter what you did or should do? I've done this twice. Once for a NASA project where my smaller company was doing work NASA judged as too hard for CSC; that my manager was one of the best ever certainly made a difference, as well as getting any tool I asked for (ah, I was among other things cleaning up after another consultant to this company abjectly failed). Not sure how long I would have done it if that was an option (the NASA consulting contract was eliminated altogether when Clinton downsized NASA). The other one I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, and I quit in disgust after less than 2 months.
GVIrish 13y ago
Having the best developers in the world is useless if you have incompetent management. In this case, requirements were delivered extremely late, and they were still in flux up to a week before deployment. The system integrator went forward with only ONE WEEK of integration testing. There were 55 companies involved in this, not to mention all the state exchanges and other federal software systems that had to be integrated. Better developers would have made a positive impact, but nowhere near enough to make this project a success.
- malandrew 13y ago
  If the managers are not developers then they are by definition incompetent to manage a software project like this. I have met a lot of competent managers that were not technical, but I have not met one that was competent enough to manage a project involving legacy systems with poorly written code and little to no testing or automation. If you are not a developer, you simply cannot understand these types of problems enough to manage it.
  - hga 13y ago
    We can infer from their mistakes, which GVIrish succinctly lists, that the managers in CMS on up to the White House weren't developers, otherwise they would have instinctively known that e.g. requirements had to be frozen for some time to give the developers time to finish implementing them.

hga 13y ago

If you've ever done government contracting, you'd know as things stand now a large fraction of those "amazing developers" wouldn't put up with its insanities when they have good alternatives. E.g. would you be happy filling out time sheets for exactly 40 hours, no matter what you did or should do? I've done this twice. Once for a NASA project where my smaller company was doing work NASA judged as too hard for CSC; that my manager was one of the best ever certainly made a difference, as well as getting any tool I asked for (ah, I was among other things cleaning up after another consultant to this company abjectly failed). Not sure how long I would have done it if that was an option (the NASA consulting contract was eliminated altogether when Clinton downsized NASA). The other one I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, and I quit in disgust after less than 2 months.

GVIrish 13y ago

Having the best developers in the world is useless if you have incompetent management. In this case, requirements were delivered extremely late, and they were still in flux up to a week before deployment. The system integrator went forward with only ONE WEEK of integration testing. There were 55 companies involved in this, not to mention all the state exchanges and other federal software systems that had to be integrated. Better developers would have made a positive impact, but nowhere near enough to make this project a success.

malandrew 13y ago
If the managers are not developers then they are by definition incompetent to manage a software project like this. I have met a lot of competent managers that were not technical, but I have not met one that was competent enough to manage a project involving legacy systems with poorly written code and little to no testing or automation. If you are not a developer, you simply cannot understand these types of problems enough to manage it.
- hga 13y ago
  We can infer from their mistakes, which GVIrish succinctly lists, that the managers in CMS on up to the White House weren't developers, otherwise they would have instinctively known that e.g. requirements had to be frozen for some time to give the developers time to finish implementing them.