Yeah... the clue is that an entire bureaucracy is required before even the first line of code was written. This thing probably took months and months of meetings with tons of people before the prototype was written.
Then you have all the daily meetings to communicate to all of those people the messaging. Then you have the meetings to clarify all the wrong messaging that went in some of those meetings.
Then you have the meetings for the customer facing communication. Then you have the customer communication.
I'm not even close to done...
If they sit on it and whip it out the moment the green light is given, then what?
If they whip it out at the next red-tape meeting, then what?
We went through months of daily meeting with 10+ very expensive execs, PMs and Business Primes from all over the business.
One day the only other coder in the room leaned over to me and said "Are we still talking about <x,y,z> that you or I could code in 10 minutes?"
Yes, we were.
I coded it and showed my managers and so forth. I was completely ignored, and the meetings rolled on. In a place like that, there are so many people that have job titles that have nothing to do with "getting it done", which in a funny way makes them less interested in getting it done. Their job is to analyze, plan, document, process map, etc. etc. so that's what they're going to do, no matter how trivial the thing is.
The manager who was in charge of the application thought that a quick solution would make him look bad. I was explicitly ordered to sit on my thumbs for six weeks.
The thing is, once you know the solution every other action is senseless. There are people who are perfectly happy being a billable body for a living. I'm not one of them.
They will be told to shut up, because they haven't listened to the requirements. No one will want to hear it on that call. They will be told it's the wrong audience.
If they push forward, they'll have a conversation with a lot of people after the meeting about how they aren't being helpful.
They'll be told to have a separate meeting with others to validate it. Then in that meeting, those people will rip it to shreds, and indicate that it needs to conform to X Y Z... The PM will then work with you to go through when what actions will be done...
Then they'll schedule new meetings. On and on.. Nothing will change.
I've tried it, and seen it tried. It doesn't work.
You go through the process, or you create even more bullshit red-tape for yourself, and you're seen as a loose cannon no one trusts.
The larger issue is that the government is not setup to move quickly, and for the majority of things the government does oversight is a good thing. That level of process does make it hard to do things like this efficiently, but it's all about trade-offs.
But if you actually did that, you'd be told off by your manager for wasting resources.
You either understand and enable the other people to accomplish what they want to accomplish, or you're not being invited ever again.
If you did that, your contract would be terminated and the PMs would find someone who knows how to turn that 1 hour prototype implementation into 3000 hours of work.
A beginner dev could build many simple web applications in a day. However, it will probably have security holes and spaghetti code.
It's an arrow that points in one of two directions. I can not think of a single way this could be made insecure. Even if someone was able to influence the direction the arrow was pointing, everyone is still going through the same ineffective screening process.
Not even a newbie programmer is going to do this. Every language out there has a Random() function.
Seriously, all these worst case scenarios and we're still well within the land of what even a middling iOS developer could crank out in under an hour.
I wouldn't bet on that. I've seen all sort of horrendous monstrosities that students and new grads have come up with.
For example, even a newbie wouldn't trust a remote client to tell you the size of a string they are sending you so you can echo it back to them, yet we still had Heartbleed and it sat there for a long time, undiscovered.
That quickly takes you down a rabbit hole, which may be why the contract was so expensive.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9234686/generating-random...
2. Everything required to make a bomb can be bought past the TSA checkpoint.
3. It would stand to reason that if a terrorist organization can get a conspirator to infiltrate the TSA, they could get, I don't know, two?
4. There's more than one person involved in the screening process.
It's not like TSA agents haven't already been caught letting people smuggle contraband past them:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/19/tsa-agent-accused-smugg...
I don't actually much care about the security of TSA hardware (my view is that it is all expensive security theater in any case). However, if you told me you spent 300K designing a very simple control interface for say, a critical component of the electrical grid, and the argument you gave me for the cost is proper security engineering, I would buy that. I certainly would prefer it to a $30 USD solution developed as a HackerRank project, even if the nominal functionality is the same.
High chance somebody gets shot.
Even though it may be cheaper to just do it 10 times over with cheap one person shops and throw out the worst 9.
I get the feeling this "knowing who to sue" saying is a bit of a myth.