4 ms·

Maybe if everyone knew how to code, we could fix healthcare.gov.

• humanrebar 13y ago
  I am under the impression that this was a project management failure, not a technical failure.
  • 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago
    No, it's because we need more coders or at least that's the essence of the problem.
  • hga 13y ago
    You are correct. Political and bureaucratic types with no experience in building big systems called the shots until the 3rd week or so of October, and were making major change orders in August, and other changes in the week before launch. And no single manager had it as his personal, full time responsibility (although in fairness, it just occurred to me that anyone savvy in HHS would have avoided such a position like the plague). The infrastructure was grossly under-provisioned, and when the general contractor/integrator including integration testing, HHS's CMS (now "fired" and replaced by the private QSSI) finally did integration testing in the couple of weeks before launch it failed hard. But somehow, in best waterfall in practice tradition, that had no effect on the decision to launch. As I like to say, no Google/Facebook/Lisper dream team could have possibly succeeded given the top down constraints. I can't even see a lot of the contractors putting in their best effort when they had to throw away so much work so often....
• VLM 13y ago
  Being able to code "hello world" is almost useless, but knowing something about scalability would help. Even if nothing more than "its important". I bet healthcare.gov is full of algorithms that scale just great as long as there's only one state, and one insurance provider, and one healthcare provider (which is a concise subversive political statement of exactly what's wrong with the American sick care system)
• pvdm 13y ago
  I don't think he has read the mythical man-month. Adding programmers to a late project makes it come out later.