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Comment by nooron | Hacker News Reader

I started a company that was asked to write a proposal to make what became the app that failed last night. I declined because it was outside of our core skillset. You can read my prior comments or look at my profile to validate this. If you want my perspective as someone who started a Democratic software company, you should keep reading.

This app emerged from a mandate to make the caucus more accessible and transparent. It was well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in. Introducing tech can help but you have to spend tons of money to make it reliable and usable, then you have to spend more to train everyone in using it. This is a problem organizations of all sizes and shapes face when making massive IT changes.

Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives. It has an unnecessarily sinister name. There are not a lot of companies that make software for Democrats because it’s an awful job. You make very little money. Everyone hates you when things go wrong, which they will, because the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent. Then everyone will assume things went wrong because you are some combination– you choose– of secretly evil, secretly working for Bernie, secretly working for The Establishment/Hillary (per someone's unpersuasive Imgur post below), or secretly working for Buttigieg.

Others have noted that Shadow also made software for the Buttigieg campaign. If you take my claims above as true, this should be unsurprising to you: a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you is not attractive to enterprising software engineers, so there are few firms available to choose.

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I don't know whether I heard correctly or if the number was accurate, but I heard someone throw out $60k as the amount paid for the app development this morning on the radio.

That sounds like a lot of money to a lay-person, but assuming $100/hr, which seems like at least a reasonable ballpark rate, that breaks down to 600 man-hours, or 15 man-weeks.

That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this. Especially since I assume it wasn't just a single person doing the coding.

People don't realize that software is expensive and a custom built application is probably not the correct choice for a single-use product. I'm sure whoever was in charge felt that $60k was a quite generous offer to build this. In reality it's basically nothing.

I used to have acquaintances approach me and say, "Hey I've got this great app idea you could help me with."

The response I found shut them down real quick was, "Great. Do you have $100k lying around to get the first beta out the door?"

60k for an app that runs results collections for the Iowa Democratic Caucus sounds absurdly low. By comparison, just to get an app like that assessed for security issues --- and my assumption is that this is not an especially complicated app --- you'd already in the neighborhood of 20k.

Why they can't just do a https website with login is beyond me.

Why an App? We all know there's nothing in it but boilerplate.

By being an app, they can easily advise the user "download it in advance and register in advance" by that verify they have it installed. Then they can make sure the app will work to collect the data in case of wifi/mobile network issues so that the user enters the data on the caucus site and if that building for whatever reason has no network go outside to upload.

Making sure that average Joe preloads a webapp and to make sure it will be configured a day later isn't easy.

Properly syncing from the web app - as discussed in these threads - adds complexity though.

Why is downloading a native app easier for Average Joe than clicking a link to a web app that's served with appropriate Cache-Control headers and uses localStorage?

Cache-Control gets ignored when browser tabs are "paged out", especially on mobile. It's egregious on Mobile Safari, where effectively only two or three pages are "live" and the remainder have to be re-grabbed. No connection? No re-grab. The version fetched might be any version from any point in history, including your "does this work?" flight that you pushed (because of course you pushed one). There's also very little mechanism to tell ahead-of-time whether a network request will work - you'll have to essentially pre-flight all server communication, which is doable, but not easily accessible the way that a "save locally, upload in background once internet" would work as a native app.

As an alternative to having them download a separate app, have them download a browser that supports the stale-if-error Cache-Control directive. It's fair to ask people doing serious work not to use Mobile Safari.

It's also fair to ask them to keep checking the native or web app to make sure the data was sent, so one doesn't have to rely on web workers staying alive in the background. Just save to localStorage, catch network errors and keep retrying.

How haven’t PWA disappoint you

But these are precinct officials, who took the time to become volunteers in this. They should be able to spend 1/100 of the effort that would take them to file taxes and preload a webapp.

From my experience with volunteers in different non-tech areas I have doubts.

If they can't open a web page they also are incapable of doing the math required on the sheet before sending the results.

A large amount of the cost (perhaps most of it) isn't in building the software, it's in working out what they need.

Yes, a webapp will cost less. But if the vendor did this bad a job on an app they probably could do just as bad on a webapp.

Changing tech wouldn't have solved the problem for this vendor.

Absolutely yes. It's true of all organizations, but I've found that with non-profits especially, just figuring out the need you are trying to address is quite difficult.

It makes me think of all that uproar for some iPad app for the TSA that just randomly showed a left or right arrow to send tell people which line to get in. Surely easy to code. But I bet it was months or years of interviews to determine that's all they actually needed.

Would it matter? You've still got to build it, the cost would be (roughly) the same.

The added complexity of having to build an app and all the boilerplate can significantly increase the complexity from just a simple website.

And while an app not hard, a https website with login and post capability is on the _extremely simple_ territory. As long as precinct official are trustable, I don't see any reason why they have to use an app.

I guess for the wow factor? As the entire political process is essentially becoming.

I think the argument of $60k being not that much still stands, and you would still be left with a sub-par result regardless of whether its an app or a website.

Many caucus workers are more senior than the average citizen. I know lots of older folks who can go to a website if you text them the address, but who can't install an app. Many apps are apps instead of PWAs for no defensible reason.

They probably could have done it in google forms for free. It’s absurd how much they over complicated it.

Why does it have to be an app? This is the part that confuse d me the most. Do it from an web page, use cloud, heck, it could even be cheaper.

You only had 1000 precincts, all you had to deal with is 1000 calls - and if one of them went wrong, you'll let that person know through some kind of reviewing mechanism. I understand that $60K is nothing but this kind of failure is absurd.

For clarification sake I suspect nobody is talking about a stand alone, run-on-the-mobile-OS, never to communicate via internet application. Idk for sure (wasn’t worth the investigation), but I’m betting their “app” is just shorthand for a web service that looks like a stand alone app through the UI.

But regardless of the architectural nature of their (Shadow Inc’s) product it’s worth noting that high performing, mission critical software is challenging to do correctly. That is to say doing it with feasible, adequate solutions for security, availability, performance, testing, and usability from the end users and administrators perspectives is a whole world of responsibility for an engineering team, even if the objective seems trivial in casual conversation.

People like to characterize software projects as “easy” and almost never know the scope of what they’re talking about. Idk anything about Shadow. But judging by their lack of effective consulting on this project, and consequently allowing such a terrible product to be released, they are bad at what they do. This whole incident should go down as a lesson to folks to not screw around with silly budgets, inexperienced teams, and unrealistic timelines when looking for quality software. That the DNC or whoever doesn’t know any better is a sign of the complete cultural ignorance that otherwise functional adults in this world have about the seriousness of software as any solution to any real-world problem. Everyone is a failure in this case: Shadow, the DNC, even the commenters still misunderstanding things on this thread.

I agree with you. Why an app, heck this could be done with a private Google Sheet. If they wanted call in tool, I could set this up in Twilio in 5-10 minutes.

Yea, exactly. The stupidity is mind boggling.

I don't think this is a failure because an iOS app was delivered instead of a website.

In a way it was. If you're building something that is going to function on one night and one night only you really, really don't want to choose tech that won't let you do an on-the-fly update if something goes wrong.

You can't update an iOS app as quickly as an website, unless it just request a view, which is even worse - just open it in safari/chrome.

Looks like someone put wrong test headers in there, for what it does, the App is 26MB.

One of the issues was that the app needed to be installed outside of the App Store. It seems that by being an app and not a website another hurdle was introduced.

$60K would probably be enough to create a landline boiler room phone bank staffed with volunteers to answer the phones from people reporting results. It wouldn't have the "wow" factor, but it would be a lot more secure.

"...Iowa Democrats, on the advice of the national party, abandoned plans to have caucus results called in by phone because of security concerns and instead build an app..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/iowa-caucus-s...

Security concerns? The same article states "the app had to be downloaded by bypassing a phone’s security settings" (emphasis mine)

No kidding - the instructions for the app itself came with a "secret pin code" printed out on paper for the volunteers to use to install it. Why not just give them a "secret pin code" to call in with to verify who they are, its just as secure.

The story when it fully comes out will be quite interesting. The assumptions that we all are making are almost certainly to turn out wrong in some way - I'm looking forward to trying to compare the ways in which I was wrong on my thinking today given the relatively sparse reporting thus far.

With $60k, they need not even be volunteers.

$100/hr is remarkably low in agency mobile work. When I was doing agency work five years ago, even our Bulgarian developers were billed out at more than that. I was billed out at 3x that back then and it would be more now. It's really challenging to find skilled developers who want to perform agency work and to keep them from leaving for a competing firm.

There would be endless queues if those Bulgarian devs would get even a fraction of that rate. They were lucky if they were getting more than $10-15/h. I also doubt there would be huge shortage of US devs willing to do the work if they were to get $120-150/h. The other problem is modus operandi of a standard software agency- it just suck your sole out for those extra lines of code.

The developers don’t get all the money they’re billed out for. The billable rate goes to the company to pay business expenses, of which developer salary is a minor fraction.

I think that's pretty much what I wrote in my comment. Agencies bill through the roof yet the devs get pennies.

The LA Times reports two Dem state parties, Iowa and Nevada, each put in $60k. Still clearly inadequate.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04...

Edit: Nevada has since said they will not use the app and are looking at backup options

It's worth adding to this that turning it into a Web App doesn't make it dramatically cheaper.

Most of the time here (and hence money) goes in gathering requirements and stakeholder engagement.

I'd imagine there is probably at least 200 hours of meetings, travel and phone calls just getting to the point of working out what they need. And yes, a lot of that is going to be physically sitting down with volunteers in some town and seeing how things are done.

I mean that's the kind of money you spend funding two interns for a few months. Is it a surprise that this app looks like it was designed by a few interns on a tight schedule?

70K is the median programmer income in the US. (Based on a very thorough let's look at the first thing Google regurgitates!)

It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months. Plus Shadow Inc's overhead + profit.

It's absolutely bonkers how shitty the industry is. A kid can throw together an app in a few days, but somehow 60K USD is not enough.

That said I work in "consulting", I know how fast time, money, billable hours can be burned through, when there's no real drive, motivation, vision and delegation of responsibilities and control.

There's no way 60k can pay for multiple people for a few months: your 60k median excludes overheads, insurance, etc.

To be honest, I'm not sure if that a few people for a few months is even enough to avoid something like this from happening: this is crazy stress launch in gymnasiums with very high device variety. It probably demands a couple months just of serious dedicated QA and dry runs if you really wanted to avoid this outcome.

They hired a lot of fresh devs from bootcamps if you checked the company page on LinkedIn. I would not be shocked if they really were that cheap.

Sure, the point isn't that it isn't possible to have an app created for that price, the point is that at that price you can only create an app that leaves a solid risk of exactly what happened.

> 70K is the median programmer income in the US. (Based on a very thorough let's look at the first thing Google regurgitates!)

BLS, which while not perfect has far better data than most other sources trying to do this independently, says $84,280 in 2018.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

> It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months

Probably. But that doesn't matter if no one advised the client that they needed a realistic, production-like field test (most of the cost for which wouldn't have been part of the contract, since it would have been client side; the developer-side support for that is a small fraction of the cost.) Errors in report definitions that exclude some data in circumstances that don't come up in developer-constructed testing scenarios is, like, not at all uncommon.

That same link has "Software Developers" at $105,590/yr[0]

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

> It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months. Plus Shadow Inc's overhead + profit.

No. The median software developer makes ~$50/hr. Overhead is 2-3x (usually higher for a smaller company but we'll be generous). So company is charging $100/hr. At 60k that's a single developer working 15 weeks (10 if we're being realistic). But we know that it is at least two developers so that's 7 weeks (2 on our realistic scale).

> A kid can throw together an app in a few days,

Sure, but it doesn't matter if flappy bird crashes occasionally. Flappy bird doesn't need to communicate with other users. I know this app they built wasn't that complicated, but the kids that are pumping out apps in a few days are above average talent and probably working more than 8hrs in a day. You're comparing above average to what is already suspected to be below average (considering they are recent bootcamp graduates and have little experience).

I guess the question is why does it have to be an app? If you've got a tight budget and deadline why add all that complexity when some cgi scripts will do and may even be overkill? It looks like it's just running a webview or something anyway.

I think it was probably standard gross misunderstanding by non-technical people of what is hard vs what is easy.

60k is absurdly low. You get what you pay for.

I think you are 100% right, it is a very tight deadline with very few manhours. I did not advance far enough in the proposal process to learn their budget but that sounds plausible to me.

I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

> I think the plan was clearly that they would reuse the software for every caucus during this primary, so the $60K was one of a series of payments for the same product.

No. The plan was that it would be used in the IA and NV caucuses, which is why the IA and NV Democratic Parties jointly purchased it.

The other states and territories using caucuses were never planning on using it. (And mostly, the other caucuses are structured differently with more primary-like features, so it probably wouldn't make sense to use shared software tailored to the IA and NV caucuses for them.)

Only four states use caucuses (IA, NV, TX, CO).

2(ish). CO is a regular primary in 2020 (post prop 107/108 in 2016). TX democratic party no longer uses caucus.

Several US territories and other states[1] hold democratic caucuses of one form or another, but are less notable due to timing/delegate count.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/04/us/politics/what-states-c...

CO cancelled all caucuses after 2016 when 10's of thousands of people got turned away because most of the gathering places were over capacity. Sanders supporters especially felt extremely underrepresented since they were young and showed up less early than others

For 2020 in the Democratic nominating process, 3 states and 3 territories, actually: IA, NV, WY, American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.

I heard the same thing in my morning radio program, it was NPR but I don't know what program.

That's actually a lot of money in an Indian context. Although outsourcing to another country might raise other kind of political problems.

A simple RESTful mobile-friendly web page could have handled this easy. What were these people thinking?

Counterpoint, the primary use environment of the application will be on a smartphone. Web applications are not even second class citizens on iOS. In a situation where the user will be entering data all night, opening and closing and refreshing, variable internet connection quality and so on, all else being equal I would imagine the ideal platform would be a native application.

I lean towards agreeing with you that a simple website plus cheap laptop would the real world best case, but I can understand why you would want a native app.

You could use local storage and make an offline web app to avoid data loss.

I agree a web app isn't great for low friction data entry, but they only enter the totals for each candidate x each round, so that'd be a dozen or two dozen short numbers for the whole night per user.

I found this which has some specifics: https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/04/politics/iowa-caucus-voting-a...

The only extra thing I see is a photo upload. Which is not rocket science from a web app either. At least on iOS you can take people right to the photo gallery or the camera.

I would really like to believe this isn't a flask app I couldn't whip up in an afternoon and polish over a week in my free time... but I'm having a hard time.

Maybe but I would guess that none of those factors were even considered.

I think that realization is something that comes with experience, and I'm guessing these people had very little real experience.

The company was co-founded by a Google alumna.

That doesn't mean as much as you might think.

Working in the depths of google and running a company are two very different things.

In my experience it actually means less. SWE who cut their teeth at google are spoiled with amazing tooling and processes to support everything they do.

My personal experience with google engineers is 20% code and 80% complaining that our issue tracking system isn't as perfect as googles was.

The two founders of Instagram spent $65k (out of $500k they raised) to launch the very first version of Instagram in 2010 [1].

[1] https://lnns.co/8zhgtOF0YCo

How many unpaid hours did they put in? How much stock did they give to people who also put unpaid hours in? Never mind that they could launch, fix, release, fix release, etc...

A venture with a long development tail after release is absurdly different from this. They had to get it right the first (and only) time, and no one is anticipating even a one in a million chance of getting rich off it.

Because they weren't seriously paying themselves. Nobody builds an Iowa Caucus app in the hopes of selling to a big tech company for billions of dollars.

So what? What's your point?

That they should have used Django for the backend :-)

> That is a very tight deadline to turn out a critical app like this. Especially since I assume it wasn't just a single person doing the coding.

One screenshot showed an SQL error.

I think if you're doing an one man job, under pressure, making an app that has limited scalability, the last thing you should be doing is not using some kind of ORM or something similar (especially at a login page)

So it looks like they made it unnecessarily hard on themselves.

The problem didn’t come from making software for the Buttigieg campaign but the CEOs wife was on the Buttigieg campaign and he was a supporter.

Also Shadow was openly hostile to the Sanders campaign in numerous encounters.

It’s not as bad as the CEO of a major voting software company saying he’ll “bring home the votes for Republicans” (Diebold, 2004) a but this is a clear case of conflict of interest.

>There are not a lot of companies that make software for Democrats because it’s an awful job. You make very little money. Everyone hates you when things go wrong, which they will, because the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent. Then everyone will assume things went wrong because...

In other words it's exactly the kind of business that attracts activist types who have non-monetary motivations and it could therefore present an opportunity for tampering, particularly since any discrepancies can be dismissed as bugs from underfunding and rushed development.

Whatever is actually going on, the system is clearly insanely broken.

>Shadow is a firm that makes custom software for Democrats and progressives.

If I can ask, why the specific nature for their clientele? Isolating your solutions to a specific political party seems strange to me especially if the emphasis on making money. If anything, money normally supersedes political leanings at the end of the day which makes the whole fiasco even stranger to me. Wouldn't you want to provide a solution for both parties by default? Not doing so seems nefarious on it's own.

It sounds like pairing products with political leanings is not a good business decision? Which may explain where all the 'hate' is coming from - it's just bad business and sows the seeds of doubt in their credibility in the minds of many.

Hey, I'm really glad you asked, and I'm happy to share. The reason that most people start companies in politics is because they have strong political leanings. You do it because you believe strongly in something or someone and want to support it, even if it pays less or sucks.

Even if you wanted to cross the aisle, it would be hard. If you work for Democrats, Republicans will not work with you. If you work for Republicans, Democrats will not work with you.

Going to especially second that last bit. Not everybody is expressly data science, but most companies start running into some sort of data at one point or another.

Campaigns aren't wrong to be concerned about who has their data. There is good historical reason for them to be skeptical that security on your system will be strong enough to prevent customers from accessing other customer's data. https://time.com/4155185/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-data...

Now imagine getting buy-in for using customer data to improve your models.

I can't blame campaigns for being paranoid about vendors potentially going across the aisle. NationBuilder is one of the only big names I know that does it. They are in a unique and unenviable position given the death grip NGP VAN has, and they pay a big price for it on nearly every front.

Really interesting point here. Although, there is a little more nuance needed and this is one of the big issues plaguing the campaigning software space - not all are created for the same goals and not all offer the same services.

If you take your example of NationBuilder, a company I know well as I led their European expansion, it only sold software not data. Unlike most American campaign software, NationBuilder does not sell data as part of their package. NationBuilder does not believe that you can create a sustainable and powerful community by using data that you have purchased, and thus only sells the platform.

So yes I agree with you that while campaigns can (and should) be paranoid about who has access to their data, and even how it is being used, this data brokerage model isn't the model that all companies adopt and it's a really important distinction to make.

While I am here, I will add the following, tech companies who want to democratise democracy (and I'm not saying that's the mission for everyone) and help lower the barrier to entry, cannot claim to do so if they alone decide who has access to these tools. Crucial decisions, such as which parties have access to the latest technology, should not be in the hands of a few tech titans of Silicon Valley - where the power they already wield is already unmeasurable.

All of the above is a fascinating and important debate and also a very American one. Campaigning and political technology is incredibly partisan in America, compared to Europe where what we fear most are monopolies.

It is possible to run into more than enough trouble with data without being a data broker.

because you are a non-partisan software? I agree with the 'getting into trouble piece' I think. I don't see how being non-partisan gets you into more trouble or would increase those chances.

Customers will probably be less upset if something leaks internal to a party during a primary than they would be if something leaked to a different party.

what is the something in this context if not data?

you do not have to be a data vendor to have sensitive data on your servers

I agree with all this. To your point, NationBuilder has been nearly shut out of the Democratic Party at anything above the local level as a result of serving Trump in 2016.

So when Republicans and Democrats walk from the Capitol to their respective fundraising call centers, is your claim that that there is a different software stack in each building to handle the call automation?

I have no idea how to find out whether those tech stacks are indeed different. But if someone knows the answer I'd definitely find it instructive.

AFAIK the fundraising done by actual elected officials is not highly automated, but tools for phone banking, canvassing, and that sort of organizing are definitely partisan (see for example https://act.ngpvan.com/paid-phones on the Dem side).

Probably.

Whenever I've done calling or canvassing for progressive causes or democratic candidates we've used some version of NGP VAN (https://www.ngpvan.com/about).

I wouldn't be surprised if there are some cross-party solutions (especially the closer you get to core infrastructure—I'm sure both parties use AWS).

You are right, in the deepest recesses there is crossover. Stripe, media companies/FB for ad buys, Microsoft Azure, AWS. It is very rare anywhere else.

I would be curious to know if you would expect these companies to be partisan too? And if not, why?

I don't know how strong political beliefs correlate with technical ability, but from my anecdotal evidence, the people I work with are highly competent and not very political.

While highly political people I know don't seem to work in tech.

> While highly political people I know don't seem to work in tech.

I mean, we’re doing anecdata here, but that doesn’t match my experience at all

Thanks for your observation.

Or they just don't talk about it at work, I sure don't.

Because politics is more accessible than the tech industry. Whatever conclusions you are drawing, they are not justified.

for what it's worth, usually people think they are not very political, but that thought itself is quite political.

Even if many people think that they "aren't very political" and are incorrect, there are some people that aren't very political and this is justified. For example, if you are a 5 year old and you believe you are not very political, you are probably correct. If you have been living in the woods for the last 30 years, don't know anything about modern politics, and believe that you are not very political, it would be weird for us to say "the thought you are not political is itself quite political" rather than "that sounds like a justified true belief."

So assuming it's possible in principle to be "not very political," the real question is how disengaged, uninformed, or lacking in understanding do you have to be for your statement to be true in itself, rather than a "quite political" statement. For myself, I think if someone is disengaged enough that they don't care who will become the next president, and there are no local political issues they will argue with someone about, they are "not very political."

You don't think there's anything political about removing yourself from society for 30 years and living in the woods?

> I think if someone is disengaged enough that they don't care who will become the next president, and there are no local political issues they will argue with someone about

What this is saying is that they are happy with the status quo, and they see no room for improvement, or they're not bothered if things are improved one way or another. You can be not interested in politics, but I think doing that is just supporting the current politics.

For many people, just existing is pretty political, like when an entire country has a debate and a vote on whether you should be afforded basic human rights.

> You don't think there's anything political about removing yourself from society for 30 years and living in the woods?

I think there's something political about it, but I also believe that it could be done for non-political reasons (spiritual reasons, practical reasons, mental health reasons). As a pure narrative, it would most likely be politically motivated, but in hypothetical-land it wouldn't necessarily be. Even if there is something "political" about it, it doesn't really map to what people mean when the use the term "political." It may map to opinions about how the state should be governed, the broadest definition of political, but it's much more frequently used to refer to a particular subset of debates which are at least minimally polarizing in some way.

> What this is saying is that they are happy with the status quo, and they see no room for improvement, or they're not bothered if things are improved one way or another.

All I'm trying to point out is that it's a legitimate spectrum. When I say "someone disengaged enough that they don't care who will become the next president" it's very easy for the reader to imagine someone in shoes very like theirs and making that choice somewhat actively to not be engaged.

But in the wide world, you can be simply unable (or unwilling) to devote any energy to understanding how the current political environment relates to your life, and thereby form no opinions one way or the other. Perhaps you work 16 hours a day to support your family, or you live in a country only temporarily and don't even understand the language. This would imply the fact that you lack the resources to form a political opinion is "supporting the status quo."

Support doesn't have to be voluntary, and often isn't. If you are coerced into supporting the status quo, that doesn't mean you aren't supporting it, it just means you lack the freedom to make this decision.

One underlying question is why there was an app for this in the first place, when election process activists basically say do it on paper and by hand with people and audits.

Anecdotally, nations doing it that way seem to report faster than when software and electronics become involved.

Can you comment on whether the proposal was part of the the SBIR / STTR program? Just curious as to the scope of companies that were participants in the proposal process.

As an aside - these instances of underfunded and underdeveloped services, specifically in the political sphere, are really painful reminders of the flip side to the idealistic technocratic future that I think a lot of folks around here assume to be an inevitability.

Caucuses are run by the parties, not the government; it went through whatever podunk procurement process the Iowa Democratic Party has, not anything federal or even governmental.

Curiously... Any take on Michael Slaby, Timshel (defunct), The Groundwork (defunct), the dozens (up to 70 at one point, many from SV/NYC) of engineers that worked on it for roughly two years in close contact with HFA 2016 (The Groundwork was right down the street from HFA 2016 HQ), and the $700,000 that HFA 2016 paid for that work? More generally, do you think there is a problem with for-profits which focus on political organizations under the guise of "focusing on non-profit"? How often do you think illegal in-kind contributions take place through these companies to political campaigns?

I worked with Michael Slaby in 2008 and 2012. He's an incredible technology manager. He's great at punching up and fighting for his engineer's perspectives and helping upper management understand limitations and then getting out of the way.

Since that time he's probably had his own epiphanies from working in industry but one of mine was that we did shockingly little QA and everything was built as fast as humanly possible. Everything was building the airplane in the air and it was largely due to constraints of the political or legal kind. Timeline management and allocating resources to testing was always an afterthought.

Testing usually comes from a feedback loop of launching broken features, incident response, manager gets in hot water, engineer gets in hot water, engineer proposes testing plan, manager uses incident as primary source reference to secure additional budget, testing implemented.

In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle.

"In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle."

This is systemic corruption. A billionaire can dump as much money into a for-profit company to build a platform for a specific campaign and then when the campaign is over then can claim that there isn't enough business to keep the platform solvent for the next 2 to 4 years and do it all again with the benefit of the previous code base. It's better than a Super PAC because the for-profit company can work directly with the campaign and no one will bat an eye. The company can even have foreign financing. All the while, their losses amount to a huge tax write-off and the public pays the bill.

In the case of The Groundwork, it likely cost upwards of $10 million for the people, building lease, AWS costs, etc. But where did all of the money come from? Certainly Hillary didn't pay for this. I'd love to see Eric Schmidt's 2016 Tax Returns.

Sounds like Hanlon's Razor in practice.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Why is any sort of "Democratic software company" even remotely necessary? Why can't they pay for white-labeled solutions? Or pay an established consulting agency to build things?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22241577

You may find this discussion enlightening. In short, trust is at a premium and there are few white-label providers.

Please educate me on something. I fail to understand why "making custom software for <insert party here>" is something anyone would want to do in the context of owning and growing a real business. This seems fraught with all kinds of issues.

First of all (and it seems I've been using this word a lot lately) this turns software development into a religion rather than a business with solid business strategy. The equivalent in other businesses, like the entertainment industry, are people who do work for stars for nothing or nearly nothing because they think it will lead somewhere. All they get is a weird and abusive form of servitude (I've seen this first hand) and no future.

Why would someone not write software for politics instead and make part of their value proposition that they are not biased (and, of course, take the steps necessary to actually deliver that).

We have a close relative in South America who owns a company that makes and markets voting hardware and software. They are not aligned with any specific political party, movement or cult. They sell to everyone, in and outside South America and have a very nice business.

Hey, I appreciate your comment and I'm happy to share. It is very hard to make into a real business, very few people have succeeded. You do it because you believe in a cause or a candidate or a party.

As far as why people don't sell to everyone, the above explains a lot. Another explanation is that political sales (which is different from true election tech, which is purchased by governments) are driven by trust and personal relationships. Once you work for one party in the US, the other will not trust you.

This is interesting and, yes, I do understand. Yet, another take on this is that groups (parties) would then rob themselves from perhaps working with or searching for the most capable of providers.

I am not trying to diminish anyone at all, but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers, particularly so if what drives this is passion rather than a skilled software shop that with proven capabilities and experience across a range of relevant domains with an equally proven track record of delivering quality, well tested bug-free product.

Of course, the parties would have to we willing to pay more than hobby money for what they need.

> but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers

This is a real phenomenon, but not in the way you think. Democrats have historically had a tech edge, because the real talent leans left politically. Obama kind of killed that, but for a good cause - he diverted a lot of those politically-driven types into working directly for the federal government under the umbrella of USDS and 18F.

Unless they're A) very large, and B) selling commodities, a company that works with one party will not hired by the other party. The two parties have two completely different sets of infrastructure.

Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be.

Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking:

Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of though can use their products to great effect. They benefit from everyone using this product, including, perhaps, their competitors and opposition.

If, on the other hand, each political party hires a passionate coder to create their own kanban board software they are very likely to end-up with a bunch of suboptimal solutions.

In other words, if they can, if the nature of the software allows, it would benefit them to look for universal providers rather than party-aligned providers. If you can trust Trello with your political party data you can then trust a similar company with other data you might produce with their software.

I guess it comes down to the software. What kinds of things are they doing that requires custom tools that have to be written specifically for one party?

The essential factors [1] are:

* There are types of software that are politics-specific, and therefore do not exist until a party pays for it to be made.

* Politics is a zero-sum game: if you're funding software (either institutionally, or by being a tech worker who works below market wage For The Cause), you don't want it to be used by your political opponents.

So commodity stuff that already exists is bipartisan. Any application that is specific to political campaigning is highly partisan.

[1] There's also a secondary issue of data security for cloud products; parties maintain extensive voter files with things like past voting history, up-to-date contact information, and past contacts [1a]. They do not want this information falling into the hands of the opposing party, and so don't want their data touching any organization that might potentially have cross-partisan ties, or godforbid might have cotenancy for D and R data.

[1a] This is basically the king of all CRMs, and these days they might be able to reimplement it as a bunch of plugins on top of a commercial provider like Salesforce, but those only became available relatively recently, data migration would be nontrivial, and there's a substantial amount of politics-specific functionality that would need to be rewritten as plugins.

What is personally interesting to me as a classical liberal is to watch how both main parties engage with followers. I generally sign up for updates from both parties from local all the way up to federal level. I do this with a dedicated email address. It is interesting to watch the approach, intensity and messaging coming out of each camp. It is also interesting to watch how far and wide your email address and info is shared. Definitely do not do this with an email account you care about.

My dentist made me a custom night guard. Is he not owning and growing a real business?

It’s quite the leap you make from there to religion.

You are extrapolating something I did not say.

Can you share any more about the proposal process? Where was the RFP posted? What were the evaluation criteria? I was kind of assuming that this was more of a handshake deal or a cold sell or something, surprised to hear it went through a structured bid of some kind.

I'll do my best, but I'll probably disappoint! A friend of mine who works in politics told someone in the IDP that I might be helpful because my company makes software for Democratic political campaigns. I had a conversation with the IDP staffer, learned more, and told them very quickly we wouldn't be able to help with this. They might have ran a more formal RFP beyond that, but I have no knowledge of it, because we did not advance beyond that conversation.

Is there a world where this type of software could be open source?

I realize this is HN but let's not be so milquetoast about the critical infrastructure of our democracy. Non-free, closed-source software DOES NOT belong in the machinery of our democratic processes.

The only thing you're doing is normalizing nepotism and excusing incompetence.

y, wow, can't believe they named the company Shadow.

Did they make the text-banking app for Buttigieg, or merely sell them SaaS? Biden, Clinton, other Dem campaigns, and the DNC have all used Shadow's software.

This is both true and why Mike Bloomberg is building one in-house.

If it means anything to anyone, my sister is naming her design company after her beloved dog, Shadow.

That's very sweet, my cousin's dog was named Shadow. I hope it goes well for her.

That remains terrible branding. Branding is part of marketing. Her dog is not part of that.

Shadow is quite relevant in design with a non sinister meaning eg https://abduzeedo.com/long-shadow-design-trend

For software, dunno

Wow, can I hire you? You seem to be dripping with expertise, and so charming.

> I declined because it was outside of our core skillset.

Um, isn't this app allowing people to enter data, and sending that to an API? How could that be out of anyone's core skillset? Almost every single app must do that.

We had to turn down a democratic contract because we could not fulfill the security requirements in time. Maybe that played a part.

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