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So if your trying to point out that this is more then just a custom wordpress site then your correct. If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically comp

by dkhenry 12y ago

So if your trying to point out that this is more then just a custom wordpress site then your correct. If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically complex task requiring extensive technical expertise you are wrong. A majority of that money is most likely overhead and even then the development is done via integrations with enterprise vendors so another large chunk of change goes to pay the IBM's and Oracle's of the world for their databases and webservers along with their "consultants" to get it all tied together. FWIW the current enrollment is 6mil so if you assume a very poor conversion rate of 1% then that is 600 million page views over the signup period and that comes down to about 38 views per second. At peak load that would only be like 1k concurrent views ( assuming a poisson distribution )

threeseed 12y ago
> If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically complex task requiring extensive technical expertise you are wrong. Have you ever worked on these projects before ? It DOES require technical expertise. Working with legacy and enterprise systems requires knowledge that most developers think they could handle until they are actually in the weeds trying to understand some arcane domain model or file format. Combine that with the integration and scaling challenges and it is quite a technical problem. Is it expensive sure. But to dismiss these projects without any visibility or understanding of the challenge requires some arrogance.
- dkhenry 12y ago
  I used to be a government contractor so I am well aware of the challenges of integrating the various systems. The challenges are almost never technical I mean consider your argument here you essentially have a system connecting multiple databases that needs to retrieve and reformat the data then store it again. That process is not complex even at the scale they are doing it ( 8 Million registrants, even 350 Million wouldn't be a problem for most database systems ) Yes documentation is always lacking and there is some reverse engineering that needs to be done, and yes there will always be some stupid wrinkle in the process, but this is a well understood problem and claiming its a challenge due to "Legacy Systems" is just a way of justifying the over 100% overhead that the government runs.
Daishiman 12y ago
You have no idea what you're talking about. Legacy integration systems typically cost several hundreds of millions of dollars and take a decade to complete. Legacy integration is huge and horrendously complex task. The coding is the least of it.
- dkhenry 12y ago
  Thats funny when I ran a team of developers responsible for integrating Legacy projects that went as far back as VMS control systems we managed to make it work with limited problems. At the same time I worked with teams that couldn't manage to "integrate" systems consisting of databases from different vendors.

by dkhenry 12y ago

threeseed 12y ago

> If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically complex task requiring extensive technical expertise you are wrong. Have you ever worked on these projects before ? It DOES require technical expertise. Working with legacy and enterprise systems requires knowledge that most developers think they could handle until they are actually in the weeds trying to understand some arcane domain model or file format. Combine that with the integration and scaling challenges and it is quite a technical problem. Is it expensive sure. But to dismiss these projects without any visibility or understanding of the challenge requires some arrogance.

dkhenry 12y ago
I used to be a government contractor so I am well aware of the challenges of integrating the various systems. The challenges are almost never technical I mean consider your argument here you essentially have a system connecting multiple databases that needs to retrieve and reformat the data then store it again. That process is not complex even at the scale they are doing it ( 8 Million registrants, even 350 Million wouldn't be a problem for most database systems ) Yes documentation is always lacking and there is some reverse engineering that needs to be done, and yes there will always be some stupid wrinkle in the process, but this is a well understood problem and claiming its a challenge due to "Legacy Systems" is just a way of justifying the over 100% overhead that the government runs.

Daishiman 12y ago

You have no idea what you're talking about. Legacy integration systems typically cost several hundreds of millions of dollars and take a decade to complete. Legacy integration is huge and horrendously complex task. The coding is the least of it.

dkhenry 12y ago
Thats funny when I ran a team of developers responsible for integrating Legacy projects that went as far back as VMS control systems we managed to make it work with limited problems. At the same time I worked with teams that couldn't manage to "integrate" systems consisting of databases from different vendors.