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> Even if we assume Twitter and Healthcare.gov serve the same number of users, the engineering and scalability challenges of Twitter far outweigh those of Healt

> Even if we assume Twitter and Healthcare.gov serve the same number of users, the engineering and scalability challenges of Twitter far outweigh those of Healthcare.gov. I may have a bias because of my background, but I absolutely don't agree. Twitter is a very busy service, a planet-scale multi-way messaging bus isn't trivial by any means, but that part is still a relatively well defined, small in scope, engineering problem and something a small team of talented engineers could tackle. That's probably the easiest part to account for. Healthcare.gov on the other hand is gigantic in scope and faces many ill-defined problems; "integrate" with 50 states and various other administrations and insurance providers and so on to deal with, all of which are a moving target. In my experience the cost of having things poorly defined is something like 100x having something well-defined, and increasing scope is a lot more costly than increasing scale.

chatmasta 12y ago
Ah, I understand your point better now. You're comparing scope vs. scale as an engineering bottleneck. That does make sense, simply because number of engineers need to increase linearly with scope, but not necessarily with scale. Put another way, scalability problems are a subset of scope problems. Still, I get the sense that the government threw way more money and engineers at this than necessary. The fact that a few relatively small "repair teams" could join the project after development and fix all the problems, makes me wonder if those problems really needed to exist in the first place. Perhaps it would have been better to group these 1000's of engineers into smaller groups of ~100, and have them compete with each other to implement specs in the fastest/best way. Pay each engineer a base salary, and then allocate the remaining money to a bonus system that incentivizes fast and quality development. All that said, I'm talking out of my ass. :)

chatmasta 12y ago

Ah, I understand your point better now. You're comparing scope vs. scale as an engineering bottleneck. That does make sense, simply because number of engineers need to increase linearly with scope, but not necessarily with scale. Put another way, scalability problems are a subset of scope problems. Still, I get the sense that the government threw way more money and engineers at this than necessary. The fact that a few relatively small "repair teams" could join the project after development and fix all the problems, makes me wonder if those problems really needed to exist in the first place. Perhaps it would have been better to group these 1000's of engineers into smaller groups of ~100, and have them compete with each other to implement specs in the fastest/best way. Pay each engineer a base salary, and then allocate the remaining money to a bonus system that incentivizes fast and quality development. All that said, I'm talking out of my ass. :)