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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what the real problem was here?

> Some people were paid too much, others not at all. Those issues snowballed with the deluge of requests to fix incorrect paychecks.

> IBM said it’s “fulfilling its obligations on the Phoenix contract, and the software is functioning as intended.”

Okay, so the cost is coming from incorrect paycheck values, but the software is working correctly?

Does that mean it's human error? Can these issues be traced back to one or a few major instances of human error? Is this a widespread issue caused by a confusing or misleading UX design?

The article is quick to talk about the projects costs and failures as well as the politicians involved, but I can't learn anything or blame anyone until I understand what went wrong.

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My guess is that IBM believes the software works according to specification. And maybe it does. Maybe the specifications are wrong. Most likely, it's a combination of bad specs and programmed logic errors that don't always follow the specs that are correct.

Of course, this requires testing and time to hash out. It would be a major mistake to scrap a project in it's final phase of refinement. They should have switched over slowly, department by department, handling and resolving issues along the way. But scrapping the entire project now only means another $1B investment and repeat down the road. Trudeau would join the ranks of the FAA in flushing multi-billion dollar software projects. It's a waste. I don't know about this project, but software engineers died on-the-job working on the FAA's AAS that never launched.

From the anecdotes I've heard, it sounds like the support staff is just wildly insufficient to handle all the issues that crop up with a major change like this. Initially the government switched over a trial group of (iirc) something like 40k employees. There were a bunch of problems with people not being paid or being paid the wrong amounts, but for some incomprehensible reason (perhaps they wanted to ditch the old system to focus on fixing the new one or something crazy like that?) they switched over everyone before fixing those.

Now, I personally know people who've been getting incorrect pay for over a year, who submit a complaint to their HR, who pass it up the chain, where... nothing seems to happen. Presumably because the 500 people or whatever it is tasked to deal with this are literally dealing with tens of thousands of issues, many of which aren't trivial changes (and so block the many that actually are trivial changes, but aren't even being seen).

Basically it was released before it was ready, initial signs of issues were ignored, and now the human side of the system is overwhelmed. It's kind of like when a web server gets overwhelmed with traffic, and it isn't set to reject at a reasonable threshold, so things start getting queued and timing out, people start refreshing pages, and it just snowballs until the whole thing goes down. Which apparently is what has now happened.

> a trial group of (iirc) something like 40k employees

Oh boy.

Don't quote me on that number; it's from memory. Point is, it was a fraction of the total, and then they released it to everyone without solving the problems in the trial group.

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