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Comment by tidepod12 | Hacker News Reader

I've no love for Deloitte, but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this. It's simply impossible to "hire 146 engineers" within any reasonable time frame, let alone get them all organized in a way that you can manage them effectively (and don't forget the project managers/scrum masters/etc that would need to be hired too). Deloitte, OTOH, has an entire existing business model based on taking vague business requirements and having huge teams of project managers/developers/consultants/advisors/etc ready to go at nearly a moments notice.

$44 million is an egregious number and I don't know how it's that high, but I'm betting at least part of it has to do with the fact that this was a website with an accelerated timeline, which probably necessitated a premium.

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That’s not my experience.

I was hired for a particular engagement with Microsoft years ago by a similar firm. Microsoft needed x, the firm had nobody so they put out an urgent call and passed me off like I was one of their long-time employees.

I think it’s safe to say nobody has a bench of 146 people ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Yes, these companies sub-contract, but that doesn't change my comment. Sub-contracting is something that Deloitte et al know how to do, and have existing relationships with staffing agencies, have an existing management structure to manage those subcontractors, have existing contracts so you don't need to waste time negotiating, etc.

And with all that said, companies like Deloitte do have hundreds of people ready to go. They may not have a deep bench for certain niche projects, but I used to work at a Big4 and for something generic like "build us a website for people to sign up", we had entire offices of people around the globe in our offshore delivery centers just waiting around for work like that. Oftentimes we would still subcontract because it works out to be cheaper if 10-20% of your resources on any given project are subcontractors, but they weren't always necessary.

Yeah, but if it got done in time but works so poorly that no one is using it, does that model actually work for anything other than being able to say "we got it done"?

This might be true for your average project, but the pandemic is not average; it’s very high-profile. Put out the word that the government needs help and you would have Googlers taking a leave of absence, like they did to fix the Obamacare website.

There are lots of great people who would rather be doing something meaningful than whatever they’re currently doing and governments need to do better at tapping into this.

It’s a different problem, but for a more recent example, look at how fast vaccinateca.com got going.

> but the one benefit they do have here is the ability to mobilize quickly on something like this

Isn't the whole article about how they failed to mobilize quickly?

This should have been started at the beginning of the pandemic, if this was a rush job then that raises further incompetence questions

I mean it's certainly no secret that the US government suffered from incredible incompetence when it came to managing the pandemic.

With that said, the start of the pandemic was ~1 year ago. Even if it started right then, 12 months for a country-wide, government-run IT project is a rush job.

This isnt that complex, its an appointment system. with the resources the government had for this they should have been able to produce something workable in 12 months. I find it hard to believe there wasnt something in place they could retool to serve this purpose

What government managed it right? Anyone in Europe?

Without enumerating the criteria for "right", you're probably not going to get a sensible answer.

A lot of the debate about pandemic management boils down to criticisms of, "did it wrong," without saying what would tip the threshold in the other direction.

This is problematic because it inspires a lot of talking past one another, resentment, and miscommunication. Ultimately it turns into a churn of frustration, defensiveness, and offense.

But even if you manage to get a response to agree on what, "right," means, the depth of their example is likely shallow. (e.g. "Such and such had only 12 infections because they such and such.")

This, too, is problematic, because it presupposes a ton of equivalent variables between the two countries. Population demographics, geographic structure, legal structure, culture, economic stratification, etc.

Conflation between a, "did it right," and a, "did it wrong," country is practically impossible, at least in the context of pandemic response. And anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is either ignorant, lazy, or obtuse.

If you get a satisfactory answer to your query, I'll move to the moon.

That is not the point. America fancies itself as an exceptional country (and it certainly is in certain respects) so it is only fair to expect exceptional results from the American leadership.

Can't we throw away the information implied by the contract that resulted in something worthless?

(I'm not taking the dismissive 'this is easy' side of the argument here, but the project failed, the lessons learned need to start there, not with the terms of the contract)

It might sound crazy, but a previous team I worked on would build solutions in this exact space (public sector) in 10 weeks using one PM and 3-5 engineers. And we would do it for free.

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