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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

These contracts are generally bloated, but if you've never seen how a $10M+ contract for things like this works you're probably thinking about it wrong. The actual development piece is a pretty small portion of the overall work. The bulk of it is figuring out all the requirements, wrangling legacy systems and data into some kind of shape that can either be interfaced with or imported, documentation, support (including phone), client hand-holding, etc. Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.

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This guy gets it. Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set.

The intersection of domain expertise, contracting/procurement creativity, and technical evaluation is the tough part to wrangle. Getting to the point where development can start is 95% of the battle in my experience.

Not to trivialize the actual development portion of the project, but most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code.

There was just an article on here last week about how software development is a learning process and programs are just artifacts of that process. Big, old, messy, and highly regulated domains will obviously be hard to learn.

Here's an example I learned on Friday:

If money is left over, apply to the next available item via (logic).

Unless money is sent twice, for two separate sub-items on the same item, in which case if the first amount is insufficient to cover the entirety of the first sub-item, the excess (if any) from the second amount, after being applied to the second sub-item, must be applied to the remainder of the first sub-item.

There are legal ramifications of doing the first way, without the second. And only the actual in-the-trenches people were able to tell us about the second.

Using outsourced process documentation is @&$&ing useless.

To be fair, this sounds like someone having a hard time saying you should apply the money sent to the entire balance.

Nope. That's pretty much what the specs (written by outsourced consultants) said.

In reality, there's one edge case where things needs to be applied in a different, distinct, and very specific order, otherwise (legal consequences).

Yeah, this is probably just my lack of context around the subject.

That said, if I get requirements like that I always have a strong feeling the case can be generalized. Laws generally aren’t as specific as that.

This is around refund payments and interest, in healthcare. So probably an outlier. ;)

not to mention the fact that by definition the software developers know very little about the domain (given that 1/2 of them have less than 5 years of experience)

On engagements like these most billable hours are spent waiting on the client to make trivial decisions or give access to data/systems. Deloitte doesn’t usually hire dummies. IME it’s always the client being a total swamp creature.

The high bill rate is for your pain and suffering from having to deal with them.

Not entirely untrue. I've billed 50% of a project's hours as "still waiting for system access."

Granted, that was a pathologically bad customer, but it happens.

The ironic thing is the question you usually get from them is "Do you have access yet?"

It's your system and your company! How do you not know the answer to that question?!

> Deloitte doesn’t usually hire dummies. IME it’s always the client being a total swamp creature.

This has not been my experience, which is really to say that the world is big enough that you can find any combination of blame imaginable somewhere. Once you have misaligned incentives no part of the dynamic can be relied on not to cause problems.

When billing hourly it is more profitable (and not always ethical) to hire average people than top performers in every role.

This is true, too often, in poorly run and ineffective consulting firms who optimize best practices to mean what is best for them.

It’s not a great look but it’s usually quite literally what the client is paying them for. I view the companies maximizing revenue the same way I’d view a shark: it’s what they are, and you can always choose not to jump into the water.

But most of the rest of it in these huge contracts could just not be done. The myth is that all of the rest is necessary when only a tiny fraction really is.

I have worked in tiny very early stage startups and old dinosaur companies. What comes across loud and clear is that early stage companies could use a bit more organization and dinosaurs could cut huge portions of what they “do” and then both would be in a similar situation to get things done reasonably well.

The bulk of the waste is an attempt to get people who don’t know what they’re doing into a position of getting things done. Sometimes it works.

I look at red tape / internal rules and policies as proofreading code for genetic replication.

On one hand, you limit (beneficial) mutation.

On the other hand, you limit (harmful) mutation.

An organization usually doesn't scale past a certain size without stabilizing its ability to copy itself. For better and worse.

Whats the prob? Its money changing hands. It flows from the Corp down to developers, managers, etc.

also it is good that corps and governments try to innovate and spend money on it.

Can it be more efficient?

Always(!)

Can it be more focused?

Sure.

But a big innovation takes a lot of factors to be well balanced and that alone is often not guaranteed nor possible given the circumstances. You just might not find the kind of devs it really needs (and not even knowing about it). So you hire the best thats available but it won't work...

Bad luck. At least you tried.

I see it that way. Whether vcs pump millions into 100 startups so that one succeeds or corps pump millions into 100 projects... Who cares? The money is not burned. It hopefully ends in my pocket

What's the problem?

People spending their lives pushing a boulder up a hill.

People paying taxes to pay for people pushing boulders up hills.

The problem is wasting human life on wildly inefficient endeavors.

people get paid doing this. would you rather have they don't have a job because all of a sudden managers realizie that 90% of what they do is bullshit?

because that's what you will get!

> Development is literally the simplest part of the problem set.

This is the single most important and insightful sentence that a lot of HN-ers are going to read today, and they don't even know it.

This guy governments.

I'd never in a million years argue that Deloitte did an awesome job on a large government contract, but it's mind-boggling to watch the regular ritual of HN posters blithely insist that anything more over $20K and a pile of pizzas for government infrastructure is a scam.

Try offering it to them to do the job and see how quickly they change their tune.

Not only do I think thats a strawman (I don't see that base level argument given that often on hn), but even if it wasn't, the truth is there is a lot, and I mean a fuckton, of money waste at the government level on IT projects. Trying to act like just because they aren't all a scam doesn't mean there isn't a systemic problem of waste that still needs to be addressed, and there are plenty of examples in even recent history that prove this point. More than just waste, the intention to fill good ol boy pockets in priority over getting the job done has significantly weakened the function of the projects, for example, the national security implications of abandoning thinthread that William Binney and Thomas Drake talk about... as just one in a myriad of examples. Virginia didn't have multiple counties become the new primary growth centers of millionares because of fair and balanced bids... and anyone pretending otherwise doesn't know how DC works.

The story of Healthcare.gov is pretty much the poster for this. They didn’t need to bring in a bunch of clever people to figure out requirements, that was already done and the site just didn’t work. To fix it they had to bring in a team of tech experts, who largely just did tech things —- competently and at a lower cost than the contractors who did the first iteration. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

While true, the team that was chosen also did not had the experience with public facing sites.

The contract was given to a team used to do intranet websites in classical JEE format and the letting them lose in such a project, designing as they knew.

https://changelog.com/gotime/154

> Trying to act like just because they aren't all a scam doesn't mean there isn't a systemic problem of waste that still needs to be addressed

No, of course not. But it's undeniable that these threads on HN (and other engineering-dominated forums) always include a healthy dollop of "I'd have done that better, because I'm a good software engineer" disdain. It's often paired with ignorance of how large-scale enterprise and government contracts and procurement work, what roles are necessary for large-scale projects with a significant discovery component, and what the planning process looks like when a team can't afford to launch-and-get-feedback or fail-fast-and-learn their way to a full specification.

I mean, this Deloitte project and the rollout are clearly a shitshow on a million levels. They got a no-bid contract for an eye-popping sum, then more than doubled it before the building even started! But the approaches boldly prescribed in most of the comments here wouldn't have produced a working system at the scale needed, either — only a cheaper broken one. A cheaper failure is still a failure.

Tech people are just as vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger effect as the rest of the population.

It makes me wonder what the heck they do at their day jobs. Requirements gathering is the impossible part.

> most missteps happen early, dooming projects before anyone sits down to code

This one is more insightful (in the big non-tech enterprise / government spaces). Because the takeaway for most HN developers who flip between projects should be: (1) learn how to recognize one of these projects & (2) stay away / find a new job when you do.

You'll save years of your work.

How might you recognize a project like this?

I think a tell-tale sign is if they apply the waterfall approach.

Didn't the guy who coined the term give it as an example of a development model that never worked?

That won't save you at all. A lot of federal IT contracts are now written to mandate using Agile or Scrum. Many other forms of dysfunction that doom projects remain.

they will say "agile", but will mean , "all requirements up front with an increment delivered every sprint".

which works very well if the developers and the customer really know what they want when the project starts.

Ask yourself some critical questions.

- is the scope well defined?

- do I understand the value add and agree with it?

- do I feel as if all stakeholders are aligned and adequately involved?

- do I think the team can pull it off ?

- do I think the mood and style fits myself?

- do I think the timelines and budgets are realisitc?

- do I agree with the level of transparency from management?

Etc etc

Ask yourself these questions - and more - and you will discover the answer for yourself.

In the end listen to your guts.

One important nuance: A project can be a major fail overal but a big success for you. Big check, new knowledge, rich connections...

In addition to what others have said, from my previous experience:

- Does the customer have an IT org capable of fulfilling basic tasks you won't be authorized to do (app / db access, AD / rights modification, firewall adjustment, AV adjustment) in a timely manner?

- Can the customer provision necessary machines in a timely manner? If using VMs, is the virtualization team competent with their chosen platform?

- Does this project directly threaten the job of anyone whose blessing / help is required to successfully deliver the project?

- Is your leadership / your customer champion intelligent and willing enough to say "No" to scope creep when the customer gets excited?

- Do the PMs attached to the project have a basic understanding of how software is built and the systems involved?

- Does their management understand the actual processes being interacted with? (Major red flag! If their management / leaders say things in meetings that demonstrate a basic lack of understanding in what their own people do, run)

It also almost certainly applies to whatever every person here works on, no matter what industry you're in or how close to pure tech it is. In fact, I'm not sure I can think of a single field where even the most brutally difficult software tech problem is actually the difference between success and failure. It can be a prerequisite, and it can often be a bottleneck to iteration speed, but it's never the real problem, which is something SWEs need to understand in order to move up into leadership.

Now think of the problem in reverse, from the government's side. Why are they contracting it out when all of the most difficult aspects involve integrating with government systems, policies and personnel - things that government already knows how to do?

"Because we don't have the expertise to do software development."

The comments in this thread, which I fully agree with by the way, just cement my belief that if government wants to deliver high-quality IT projects they need to start developing the expertise to do it in-house.

Ha, I'm currently a federal government program manager, so I am thinking about it from the government's side right now.

I've also been a consultant cog in a mega-corp and run my own small consulting business, so I've seen it from both sides.

Tech folks underestimate non tech challenges (basically anything outside of their domain), and clients don't actually know what they want. It's an age old problem in lots of industries.

I’ve been working in enterprise/government sector for a few years now and my observation is that they need to focus on better systems design. Everything is too convoluted. Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear is where most of the money is wasted.

Oh, my last disappointment of the week was being lectured via 2 screenfuls of Confluence with a “it’s more complex that what you make it” exposure of 2-3 layers of encrusted legacies. The PO was flexing and glowing how their managed to build into the new product this synthesis of bad designs. Which means entire departments get a list of rotating passwords by email every couple weeks. The network of ossified legacies just grew one more sprout.

> Trying to make the software fit the poorly thought out and implemented legacy ERP design from yesteryear

“We need a new system, but it has to function exactly like the old one.”

Including any bugs and craziness.

I've wasted far too much time in my career doing exactly this for federal government customers. My favorite is when someone insists a feature is critical and must be replicated, but when I dig into it I find it *never* actually worked and as such, no one was using it.

I’ve seen several new systems that actually were the old system, with a screen scraper and a web interface slapped on top.

Made worse when you have lots of money and even more stakeholders.

Perhaps worst of all, when failure has no true cost, avoiding failure matters far less. The CDC won't go broke because they blew through $44 Mil. Most every other organisation would. That's one of the challenges of government, the lack of creative destruction.

I work in a similar sector but have a strong belief that the software delivery can and should become a capability that occurs within the government.

They should be diligent in what capabilities they choose to support. And ruthless in continually developing and pivoting these capabilities.

This is true of any large organization or enterprise that operates in a software enabled domain, so yes, most industries. The idea that software development is too difficult and should only be contracted out to fleety consultants is one that needs to be properly put to rest.

And to be clear, I'm not saying that consultants have no place. But for the type of technology and delivery as required by the project in the OP - there's no excuse.

Would you say the price is justified?

Domain expertise is important, but I really struggle to see the 10s of millions of domain expertise at play here.

Exactly. The UK in-housed their entire website IT team, and it's one of the best set of government websites I've seen worldwide, UX-wise and performance-wise.

If I recall correctly the UK digital govt is leveraging Camunda, which has some mindbendingly good pieces.

Camunda is not as well known in North America, it will be interesting to see what emerges in the digital transformation/rpa space.

There are a lot of Accenture consultants working in the Digital Service.

GDS is a shadow of its former self now though

Tbh the UK is a shadow of its former self now, as are all things in it.

This is pretty much what I've learned doing 5+ years of big enterprise consulting (though not government).

If the hardest / longest part of any project requires domain knowledge and personal relationships, then why are you outsourcing that part?

I don't care if it's not a core competency / something you can do. Make it one.

One of the biggest challenges for large orgs is that the knowledge they need to do a given thing is almost always present inside the organization — but it's fragmented and scattered across different teams, roles, and balkanized administrative boundaries such that the big picture is almost never available.

A high-quality consulting partner works to build the relationships and internal lines of communication that are necessary for the client organization to do more of the work — maybe all of it! — in the future. A cash-grab consultancy will just make themselves the organization's "glue" and bill until the money runs dry.

That last dynamic you described is exactly what I saw at a very well known university: upper management knew they weren’t getting the accurate details through the middle management filter, but shied away from fixing the cultural problems. Instead, a major consulting company was charging a considerable amount per hour to have 24 year olds with expensive suits interview the actual workers, summarize what they’d been telling their management for years, and present it directly to the senior level. Fixing the system would have saved millions but required fights they weren’t constitutionally well suited for.

Absolutely, but this is essentially saying "We're okay paying a 2-10% tax on our revenue, forever."

I think that's the reason you tend to see these unhealthy dynamics in extremely conservative, quasi-monopoly industries (government, financial, healthcare), where there's no real question of if they'll be a going concern. And no real rewards / attempts to outperform at the cost of increased risk.

Critically, if someone within the org volunteers to organize and manage the cross departmental knowledge they'll be shut down by people within the company for trying to accumulate power or stepping into someone else's turf.

Only an outsider can safely talk to everyone. They aren't a threat because they aren't part of the company and therefore can't take over.

It cannot be volunteer work. It has to be sponsored from the top. If it is, then a team of qualified FTEs can do this job similar to an external consultancy. But rarely will old-timer well-settled FTEs will leave their current position and take on this temporary risky gig.

Also, the end result and the path to get there isn't clear for FTEs – let's say they did the functional domain requirement gathering work – then who will implement it – they will have to contract out the development work – they may not be empowered to think and see through to the end goal fully.

On the other hand, for the top management folks – it is easier to temporarily empower the external consultants and terminate the engagement with them at any time – but they cannot do the same with FTEs due to employment laws etc.

What if it wasn't temporary, but just part of the CEOs office? The first goal should be to actively prevent these foul-ups by keeping open lines of communication.

I've always thought that a team like this is critical to keeping a company running. Any org that's 1000+ needs a 5-7 person team outside of any department that the CEO can throw at problems, but no org that I'm aware of has adopted this structure.

Though mostly about ladder climbing and relationship drama, the show 'House of Lies' has some really good scenes where the management consultants do actual work, which is pretty much portrayed as doing the things you've listed. Even as a fictional show, it made it easier for me to understand these situations and not get so flustered when encountering them.

I've been in technical, not management, consulting, but House of Lies felt disturbingly accurate.

Except I usually just stared at bad movies in hotel rooms to decompress after dealing with clients, rather than blow and strippers. Sue me, I'm boring.

Heh. That stuff has always felt like an inexplicably weird trope, like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

After 8 hours in a windowless conference room with a parade of stakeholders, making RACI matrices on a stained whiteboard and scarfing down cafeteria sandwiches during "bio-break," I want to _talk to my wife on the phone then stare blankly at the ceiling_, not go out for a night on the town.

laughs Agreed. The most interest thing I tended to do was "What looks like a good restaurant in this area?"

... did get really good at reading between the lines of Yelp / maps reviews. (Objectively, friends have since commented on it)

> like Hackers-inspired visions of computer people as living Mondo 2000 articles.

Upvote just for this line of poetry. Mondo 2000, haven’t heard that name in decades.

How do tech consultants approach their work?

I am definitely biased by my past experiences with tech consultants. I’m trying to sort out if it’s a service provider issue or if it’s a customer side issue.

From my limited perspective, it seems management consultants are focused on 80/20 solution approaches. While it seems technical consultants are focused on delivering MVPs that don’t seem to map well to the business space.

The disincentive that tech consulting has is that jobs (at least in my area) were usually bid at fixed price.

I have no idea if that's the way larger firms do it (would expect not).

Consequently, profit = contract price - consultant hours. Every bad happened from minimizing the latter.

Even if you do straight up billable hours with the client, your time was typically scheduled 1-2 projects in advance. This lead to being prematurely (in terms of things being "done") rolled off a project, onto a new one, and finishing / supporting the first from your hotel after-hours.

This was in a pretty cowboy area. I imagine different parts of technical consulting behave differently.

But yes, MVP quality code seems to be a constant. I saw that delivered from a top-tier technical consulting firm (ML solution) to a T100 customer.

I can attest that the second modus operandi is the way long time contracts work from my experience.

Nearly every time all the knowledge and skills necessary are hidden and fragmented inside our client's org. With our access through all the management layers and silos we could work to fullfil the contract and also enable change within the client organisation and culture.

But why kill the golden goose? Our higher people' bonuses depend on us being the glue as someone else wrote in another comment. And a lot of my colleagues actually on the client's really do a great job in opening lines of communication. They work their a*es of to help the client.

Sadly helping isn't a monetary long term strategy for upper levels.

In the end

> until the money runs dry.

And once a year as the government decides its budget you get to chew your nails as you wait to see if the money is in the next budget.

> then why are you outsourcing that part?

To what extent is this due to neo-liberal "small government" policies, where from the highest political levels - through lobbying - it is decided that outsourcing is a win-win that leads to financial savings and budgets that are cut, and later on cut some more, etcetera?

I've witnessed the crazy dance of enterprise consultants in large corporations (not government) and it is astounding how much money is wasted in inefficiency.

I was in a small tech shop and we had just won an RFP at a big corporation, with a very practical solution and for a limited domain. Our down-to-earth approach led to so much enthusiasm with corporate employees, that they sent all their consultants to us to investigate interfaces to ever more back-end systems. Scope ballooned, and we - being a small party - were dictated to support all this stuff. It was utter madness to such extend that we decided to more-or-less graciously wringle out of the contract. Just-in-time before we were committed to a monstrous project that was 100% certain to fail. And that was not the only time we experienced this phenomenon in big corp.

Complexity management is the name of the game. On all levels: functional, technical, organizational.

On tasks where building the initial framework is the most expensive part, swapping out contractors only serves to abstract away complexity without reducing its cost.

It's better to have an in-house dev department in these cases even in the complexity side, if you realize that complexity in the contractor side is just as bad as complexity in the basic org.

Does the government, in fact, know how to do those things? How would we know if they did or didn't?

I notice that they spend oddly large amounts of money on anything for which we know what the cost roughly should be -- e.g. CDC web sites -- and don't seem to do so very quickly or very well. Should we assume that they're a lot more competent at things we know less about?

Agencies are less likely to be competent in non core areas. This should not be surprising. There is no career path for you doing software in an agency like the CDC run by bio science people. Same for the Air Force, which is run by fast jet pilots, the Congress by lawyers and liars, Commerce by thieves, etc. Even banks and trading firms, who live and die by software, are run by accountants and economists.

Unless an organization recognizes the core importance of software and carves out a specialisation stream and C level ownership of it, they rarely achieve more than brief or isolated competence.

This is the reason why SV is so appealing -- nowhere else do SWEs hold sway over entire companies and industries.

Govt can do excellent software if it becomes a priority, they could pay competitive wages (there are special pay scales for doctors and lawyers), but they choose not to because of risk aversion from politicians, who mistakenly believe they can outsource the risk.

For something like this, paying Eventbrite to do it wouldn't have been a bad place to start. But the fat cat consulting firms never have domain expertise beyond getting Govt contracts.

There's a couple of reasons government IT projects turn out this way.

In my experience, a lot of the time it's not so much that the contractor is trying to make money by prolonging the problem. It's that the customer doesn't know how to be a competent product owner that prioritizes and scopes things properly.

Then, frequently the software being designed ends up replicating broken/inefficient business processes, so it ends up being difficult to make cleans and efficient software. This becomes worse when there's legacy software in the mix where the customer wants the contractor to port over all of the clunky functionality of the old app. Which of course isn't documented in the first place, so you've got to perform software archaeology to figure out what it did.

Some other show stoppers I've seen are when key stakeholders act as gatekeepers and prevent developers from talking to SMEs directly, so you have to build your requirements based on what the person with the 10,000 foot view knows. So of course you get incomplete and sometimes completely wrong requirements. And you might not find out how wrong they are until after you've spent a lot of time building things

Just those dynamics alone can add an enormous amount of cost or outright doom a project. I could probably fill a blog with all of the dysfunctional stuff I've seen in federal IT, but suffice it to say that these factors can easily balloon costs and timelines to a comical degree. This $44 million failure is actually small compared to some other government IT failures like the billion dollar Air Force accounting system.

They have started.

https://www.usds.gov/

Exactly, that's why I turn down companies that don't take a tech first approach, if you rely on tech, you ARE a tech company. Clearly the government doesn't see itself as a tech venture of any kind, but tech fails in silo. Tech first is the only way tech can succeed at delivering value to your business. Otherwise, go back to traditional processes, stick to SharePoint, email, excel, and manual logistics. And ya, this is true of the government as well, if it wants to modernize and leverage software innovations it'll need to start approaching things with a tech first mindset.

corruption?

There is often the expertise in house, but over years the internal teams get terribly under-funded and the poor service that results is then used to justify spending vastly more amounts on external suppliers.

This always comes down to piss-poor and craven senior management decisions.

> if government wants to deliver high-quality IT projects they need to start developing the expertise to do it in-house.

This is basically true for any organisation.

The US has a CTO, so there seems to be some structure to support this notion, right?

It does. However every piece of the government has their own as well who don't seem at all beholden to it.

the UK has done exactly this - to make all Government Digital Services in house. It's been a blockbuster success in my opinion - they have some of the best UX/UI in the world and their websites are ultralight and downgrade well.

There are a few issues with authentication, but there is support. Everything that's related to dealing with the UK government btw is all in ONE website, where everything is explained to you in Plain English - gov.uk

Coming from a country where this doesn't exist, I was blown away by every interaction I've had with the system. It's simply amazing.

Every single GDS project I’ve been on is 90% freelancers all via a small handful of companies — it’s not really “in-house” but at least it’s better than absolutely everything going to capgemini, Fujitsu, NTT, ATOS and the like, sure.

Did not know that, still the QC of their work and overall integration of services seems world-beating to me. I had never seen anything like it.

Their UX documents and implementation are for my money some of the finest in the industry.

As a foreigner living in the UK, I concur. All .gov.uk are _extremely_ functional. Applying for the pre-settled status (cos Brexit) was actually an enjoyable experience! I had no idea what was going to happen when I started the process, and it was all done in 30min top. It made me _scan my passport with my smartphone_ while flashing weird colors and it worked flowlessly, that absolutely blew my mind.

I've actually looked into getting a job there even though I'm from a start-up background

Yes that was some of their best work. I believe the flashing lights allow for some sort of 3D reconstruction of your face? And scanning the passport with NFC!

One of them is high-tech DYI solution, the other one is super simple yet not used at all by any other govt service I've interacted with.

The sad, true reason why they don’t is that government programmer jobs will pay 1/2 - 1/3 what a private sector job will pay in the DMV (DC, MD, VA). And the ironic part is that the reason private sector pay is so high is largely attributable to these big federal contracts being handed out. But as things are, the federal government cannot hire enough qualified people in the location (by DC) that they want to.

I’ve heard the main reason is that it’s impossible for the government to pay market rate for high-end software engineers, because of fixed pay bands.

I’m going to be discrete but I know of a Deloitte project where they are allowed to use AWS Fargate, but the gov’t side is limited to IBM mainframes. Why are they so limited? Who knows, but it’s a deep question, that would require total reinvention. Perhaps, in the end, it might not even be worth the risk because the gov’t is so essential. They can’t move fast and break things. But it does look insane as a result.

FEDRAMP requirements and auditing are difficult and expensive to meet. I've seen the cost of these in bids. We said something like $20k per month for what would be a $50 per month EC2 server. It was a shocking thing to see. I'm guessing Deloitte is charging six figures a month to host this thing.

The problem is you can't fire Government employees. The impact of hiring specialized staff that don't perform is very high.

I worked for the government and it was pretty damn hard to get further training. We had no funds for conferences, classes, travel, or any such. All the improvement was down to me, what I could learn about R/stats/STATA from forums, from colleagues, and from the 1500 member analyst email list. There were all sorts of forums/libraries "within" the government system, however their search functionality was garbage and they didn't have enough users to make it a useful forum for most topics. Sigh!

Wait! If there was a sane set of APIs and data interchange formats that was standard across the whole system, development would be the simplest part.

It's because they have to shoehorn their solution into a morass of garbage software, that this turned into such a complex task.

The real answer is to dump ALL these huge contractors, and their 'solutions', and make something new and better, with proper engineers directing the process.

Imagine if Deloitte had been contracted to 'invent' the Internet...

>>> with engineers directing the process

This is usually not the solution. You have to understand the requirements/know your actual users. Engineers don’t necessarily do this well. They build with the latest tech but as you see in this example, the primary users are older people who can’t use latest tech

> Engineers

As far as I’ve seen there’s people that build first, and ask questions later, and the reverse. Only the latter are engineers.

Agreed. This is not a No True Scotsman -- understanding true requirements is a fundamental attribute of engineering. If you aren't doing that, whatever you are doing it isn't engineering.

Ha ha I know, but it isn't like that. APIs are always written as REST but the systems serving those APIs are not REST so everyone starts off building lots of GET APIs and then progress steams to a halt because it's tough to write loads of APIs for the many different types of write data flows in most systems.

This is depressing but oh so true. I've worked at a few companies and they're all the same.

The business team schedules an hour meeting with the project manager once a week for two years to figure out the requirements.

I spend a sprint implementing the backend in parallel with a frontend person. We spend another sprint testing and fixing bugs.

Then the project sits in UAT for 6 months while the business suggests contradictory things.

Finally the project is shelved indefinitely due to budget issues.

Edit: fixed typo

This sketch comes to mind: https://youtu.be/BKorP55Aqvg

Yet that is the part that is broken now.

Sure all the requirement gathering and other costlier project parts can doom the success of the project because you built the wrong thing.

Here however the tech debt and bugs is why the project is abandoned

The project management part, which I agree is the hard bit, could be made tractable too. Other orgs manage this all the time and build sophisticated software which continues to improve.

This is a booking management system for appointments, the initial problem statement is trivial, the difficulties lie in interfacing with other systems, simplifying UI, getting data in and out, providing some customisation but not too much, etc. These are all things you don't know how to do till you start using it.

The process you describe of getting 'domain experts' in a room to decide on a spec without contact with the real users then throwing it over the wall to build is fundamentally broken. You won't get to even 50% done without real users - that's the problem, and it sounds like that's what happened here.

You simply can't build a system like this without frequent contact with real users (old people booking appointments, volunteers entering data in a hurry, pharmacies who need to add extra info for patients), experts on the other hand will often add negative value unless they are trying to use it.

If there was a will within the org commissioning the work to appoint one project lead and then get out of the way apart from demanding weekly builds from week 1 onward this would be tractable. Collect feedback from real users and deliver every week. This is not rocket science and a small team could and should do it if allowed the space to do so.

A good team, having done this just once, assisted by domain experts, would bulld a code and knowledge base able to get the jump on future problems.

Wash, rinse repeat and it won't take long for things to run very nicely.

Bonus, code can be published, standards made, all that and bot rented by the year.

What they need to do is flip the script. Instead of only looking at the input side of these systems and how to plug into older systems not designed for it, look at the output side of everything that’s built and make sure it is api first so future projects can integrate much easier.

At the city of antwerp we flipped over in 2015 from a typical assortment of poorly integrated consultant-built monoliths to a microservices api-first approach. It became a hard requirement that all functionality provided by new systems had to be offered by a documented api, and most of the newly built systems dogfood their own api’s from the ui. In 5 years this caused a fundamental shift, where it gave us the ability to set up a covid contact tracing app for schools in weeks, because it was mostly the piecing together of well documented and battle tested api’s.

Could you elaborate on this experience? How did the city deal with institutional reluctance/resistance?

Or to mention they have to price in the tender development and the cost of all the failed tenders that they made for similar projects.

Indeed, that guy really gets it.

One of my previous employers had a very good software and it sold such software to various other companies around the world. Such software was highly complex and really the top money could buy in the field. A yearly seat for a single user could cost up to around 5-7 k$.

Yet for years the company made most of its money from "installation projects" and "professional services", that is working with the client to understand its needs and implement customisation to the software to make it work well in the customer environment.

What you mean is that 95% of the time and money spent is about different bureaucrats fighting over turf wars and trying to get some credit in ,to be able to claim responsibility if it works, but at the same time not exposing themselves too much, just in case it blows badly.

Bullshit. The broken system Delloit developed is being replaced with Eventbrite in certain states, pen and paper in others. All the users needed was a simple scheduling system which shouldn't cost anywhere near 40M to develop no matter how you spin it. Is Eventbrite works for this, why did no one actually think to just use that (or the many similar systems created for this kind of thing)? Pretty sure Deloit itself just wrapped something like Eventbrite around a skin UI and delivered that.

The only answer I can come up with, even after trying to be generous, is corruption. The fact that there was no bidding should be enough for that contract to be highly suspicious. People in the top are pocketing most of the 40M and everyone involved knows it.

As much as this contract will certainly be a barrel full of pork, and Deloitte can go eat a bag of hammers, I feel this take is a little naive.

A commercial service is optimised for profit, not broadest accessibility. For example Eventbrite won't spend money developing special features for very specific niche user cohorts because of diminishing returns.

Government websites can't work that way, they have to be accessible and usable by all citizens. Think of people with different learning abilities or language proficiency, the likely environments the users might be in, and their general technical abilities.

Here in the UK there are strict rules about use of clear language, well thought out user flows, how to ask for certain types of information etc that has all been backed by years of research. We have a whole government department that covers this and will audit your new service to make sure it is good enough.

Having done this as a web developer for our Government, it was a massive eye opener to have a copywriter pick through the language I used in a form flow, and point out how confusing it could be to some groups of people. Or indicate that the method by which I was asking for an address made no sense for certain remote locations, and it needed to.

A few specific things to point out on Eventbrite in particular. It seems to me that you are likely have a whole bunch of other requirements too. Off the top of my head you'd need more powerful management tools to control: simply setting up so many locations and dates, who can book when (patient cohorts, priority groups), the logistics of vaccines and vaccinators, tracking vaccine batches used for each person.

> Yes it's a lot of overhead, but this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks.

I get your point, but also yes it is. The issue is superficial, it's like when I try to Zoom with my mom, it'll take 10 times longer as I need to explain and bring her along every single step of the way. This is the same for these type of contracts. A lot of the slowdowns come from people just not letting development take its course as it should.

Just look at the article, the states ended up choosing to use a bunch of SaaS startup not even designed for this use case in its place, like eventbrite.

And look at the issues:

> “It won’t work on Internet Explorer; it only works in Chrome. The ‘Next’ button is all the way down and to the right, so if you’re on a cell phone, you literally can’t see it,” says Rowe.

That's not a project management issue, that's a full on development issue, it doesn't even work on mobile in 2021 !!

This is it. Even if the feature set fits perfectly, a private organisation will optimise for profit or growth, not broadest usage.

The user that needs help finding a button isn't worth the development cost. Gov services cannot operate that way.

Is Eventbrite Chrome desktop only or is the CDC contracted website? I think you may have read that backward.

> zoom with my mum

I don’t get why people don’t just use Whereby, no login no plugin. It makes conferencing so easier.

Probably because they haven't heard of it.

I worked at some government contractor a few years ago and one of the tasks I was given was to oversee the implementation of a ticketing system for a client. The basic requirements were for something slightly better than using an excel spreadsheet with basic search functionality. After a preliminary sales call with one well known vendor, they told us the next steps to implementing this system was to bring a consultant on-site to assess all the ancillary requirements, at a cost of nearly $100k. I had a little laugh about it with some colleges and my manager and I kind of wept a little inside, because I doubt this is a rare occurrence and it only takes 1 incompetent manager to create a massive amount of useless revenue for some vendor.

I've seen massive government contracts where "Big Consul" has some guy who does nothing else than take all documentation from the previous "Big Consul" and rewrites it according to their own internal format, and they bill €150 an hour for it, for months... And then when their time is up and the new tender starts the next firm does the same thing to rewrite it all in their format...

No, this is not cynical enough.

Even the part you mentioned: 'wrangling data for legacy systems' does not cost that much, it's still a small piece of the pie.

The 'bulk of it' goes to sales, BD, marketing, profits, layers of excess management, specialist consultants, accountants and lawyers.

This contract is an example of 'modern world graft'.

Healtchare.gov cost $1-2 Billion and it was also a mess until Google Engineers came in to save it.

Software is not like Construction where the costs can at least be well estimated and you don't need geniuses.

It's frankly very depressing and this kind of graft and stupidity is all over the system.

There are actually not that many people who are both: 1) technically/project competent enough to figure it out and 2) have enough gravitas on the business side to make proper bids. Partly that's the fault of government.

To be fair, it's also bad buyers who change requirements all over the place and throw projects in dispensary often for what are ultimately political reasons.

It's a real failure of leadership.

> 'wrangling data for legacy systems' does not cost that much, it's still a small piece of the pie

Are you sure? Because I think it might possibly involve:

- interfacing with an old COBOL system

- interfacing with an old DB2/ORACLE/(legacy database) with a "very creative" Schema and even more creative indexes (or maybe none - who knows). More bonus points if it's not even ASCII encoded

- Production system runs on a VM serving an old classic ASP or PHP app

- Data can be exported through an XML from Hell but that takes 2h to export.

You forgot the step where you even need to identify that these things already exist, and whats in them.

Are there governance requirements around the data in them? I'm not familiar with US law, but we're talking about PII in this example so what legal and privacy hoops need jumping to copy the data?

Thats before we get to "Can an person with this specific learning disability, or a person who doesn't have a fixed address navigate through this form?"

I've done some of those, 90% by myself, for a modern ecommerce site for a 150-year-old company on a 30-year-old Oracle DB.

> Software is not like Construction where the costs can at least be well estimated and you don't need geniuses.

Construction is notorious for cost overruns?

Yes, but measurable, understandable outcomes.

And when it goes way over, it's usually easy to identify the problems, it's just often politically infeasible to address them.

With construction - the numbers are on the table.

And FYI - aside from massive project, municipalities and construction is happening all the time. There usually are not massive overruns for such projects.

For many corporate client system developments this is my experience too. Producing the actual LOCs is not the primary cost; it's requirement gathering, figuring out how to plug in the new component into an existing system etc. As an example of the first, you might be digitizing a cross-department workflow. Your job now basically becomes to interview stakeholders from each dept and have them commit to a single online workflow. An example of the second is you might want postgre for your backend, but the client might want a single stop db on whatever they're using today.

Then there are challenges around integrating with existing APIs, workflows etc.

Let's not forget feature creep. Sometimes the client might not be able to visualize the final UX in its entirety (often simply because multiple people are involved),and therefore, they might only begin realizing its impact as and when parts of the new system becomes available.

Essentially, you are not paid to build an isolated system, but to understand well and play nicely with the larger context - human and technological - within which your system must live.

From the article it seems that they don't provide tech support neither to doctors, nor patients. And wrangling legacy systems in the field still may be worked out for much less money.

The real problem is that requirements are written in such a way that very few (in this particular case just ONE) companies can satisfy, so essentially there's no competition - exactly a kind of situation which lets to pump up prices.

And if you asking yourself are those requirements really benefit users, or specifically created for money to go to, you know, "right hands" - you're probably asking the right question.

Why are they even building custom software at all if the target demographic is 70+ ? And why are they making senior citizens opt-in for an appointment ? its idiotic. They should have nationalized the browser/OS vendors to provide a solution, for free if its a national emergency.

Not to mention the terms in these kinds of contracts. The only way to deal with them is to charge enough to be protected. I have sold product (hardware) to places like the Navy Surface Warfare Center and White Sands Missile Test Range. If you are not careful you can come out losing in a big way.

For example, for each day/week/month you deliver past the estimated delivery date they discount 5% from your invoice. Sound like great motivation to deliver on time, right? Well, no, it's a guaranteed 100% (or whatever you can get away with) markup beyond what you would have charged because if anything goes wrong you'll go broke.

That said, this issue of super-expensive government websites done wrong feels all too common. You have to wonder how much cash we burn repeating the same mistakes.

> this isn't a run of the mill green-field SaaS app a few 22 year olds can crank out in a few weeks

It’s probably exactly that. I always strongly wonder if you wouldn’t get a better result if you gave a pair of 22 year olds 1M and a year to develop and figure out all the same things.

Bingo.

You just have to find the correct pair.

Doesn't actually matter how old or young they are, just that they don't actually need more experience than you could get from two top-performing 22-year-olds that could easily make more than a million in progress over a year.

And it would have even been worth it to spend the first year doing nothing but intensively searching for these two so you could have operators so far above average and so well suited to the task, and so well agreed upon over a period of a whole year, that nothing else could even come close. It would probably be best with a pair who are equally motivated whether they would be getting the half million apiece or not, because a lot of that could be spent by now.

When everyone creating the software has the rare extreme performance ability that very few companies ever get to have even one employee that good, the more suitable the performance the fewer operators it should be expected to require.

This just has to be put into perspective compared to what you can get from a typical bureaucratic team for $44 million.

Average bureaucrats have never been good enough for average things.

And then supporting it. For a decade. 44m might be bloated, but, it goes quick and it is work no one really wants to do due to how hairy and legacy it can get.

Ongoing support isn't the issue here, this is basically a greenfield project with nothing hairy to get in the way.

These contracts often have the hosting and other support fees over some long period built in. I didn’t dig into this one specifically, but it’s quite common.

It sounds like they needed a senior business systems analyst to map out the functional requirements specifications document.

Usually, though not always, this helps to give a road map for the organization to follow.

Bugs will arise of course, but usually, it becomes localized, and can be addressed individually.

But for large systems, with lots of moving parts and data integrations with other systems, then you normally need a good, near-air-tight specifications document.

I work for a megacorp outsourcer, and when we run big projects, we embed Business Analysts in the business, so they are working alongside the key stakeholders/decision makers for the duration of the project.

A recent project was valued at around $10M USD, but for that the customer got a fully-featured mobile app that their entire blue-collar workforce will use every single day, replacing gigantic paper work packs.

The backend was hybrid-cloud, interfacing with multiple on-prem systems, including a legacy ERP system which had started life in the early 80's.

So, it was a big and complex project - but it was also a successful one, because we know how to run projects like this. There were various factors that led to success. The BAs were probably most integral. We also held regular week-long workshops with the customer to work on the backlog, with the architect/tech lead (me) and dev team leads all present too. There was a group of pilot users, that always had access to the latest features. And of course, we used automated tests.

Any big corp, like Deloitte, should be able to deliver a relatively simple website, even if it has multiple integrations with legacy systems. And they should be able to advise and steer the customer if they are woolly on what they actually need - there is only so much blame you can put at the customer's door when systems like this are a disaster.

Ouch my imposter syndrome

Still not a $44mm problem.

I’d say getting the contract signed is already 1/3 of the total.

You need to be big enough to apply (requires investment), apply to many government contracts, you need to understand the legal terms, price them, understand the regulations, price them in, then price the software development itself and price any other provider (hardware happens very quickly), and if you guess wrong, like on 1/3rd of the projects, you’re in debt... and you have 100% chance of getting the contract if you price it wrong.

Getting the contract done is another 1/3 of the contract, and the lawyers to deal with disputes and prove that you’ve done the contract, is another 1/3.

When did we have the last nationwide vaccination campaign, whats the "legacy"? Pretty sure that was when IBM still made tabulators.

I think you will find that if only there was someone in charge to put their foot down, you can do without a whole lot of these things. But that's part of the problem of course: the government contracting out is just a bunch of clueless people making up a wish list with a partner on the other side whose only inclination is to say yes to everything.

The data flows into legacy systems like VAERS

Have you seen the vaccination setups? It's just car queues! I'm sure nothing there "flows" without a whole lot of manual data entry.

So now what, you are reporting this adverse event to VAMS who reports it to VAERS? There is no flow, it's all just duplicate effort from architecture astronauts.

Vaccinating a whole country is a hell of a lot more complicated than just car queues.

Huh? States have lists of eligible vaccination recipients that they reach out to. It’s very much not just keeping track of a line of cars.

You’re actually saying it costs millions to hand off data to a legacy system? A system that has probably had to consume something like XML or JSON in the last 20 years?

There is no excuse for this kind of cost for things as simple as tracking g appointments and completions regardless of data transformations and storage. There are no magical new protocols or data formats it’s using, it’s just a lot of people charging too much for them to have week long meetings to talk about their area of expertise. It’s an embarrassment.

Sounds like a lot of $6-700/hr management consultants that don't know much about tech but are happy to channel their inner Steve Jobs to try and architect something.

The 22 year olds might not be able to do it (I beg to differ), but can management consultants/accountants who barely took typing in school who have Excel as the height of their digital literacy be expected to have all the answers?

By the time this gets to technical folks, 70-80% of the budget has been burned.

Edit: Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Edit 2: removed age reference.

So very much this when it comes to how easily money can be wasted on these kinds of deals.

Can’t agree at all with the ageism though, which is wholly uncalled for.

I don't mean to support any ageism and would be happy to withdraw my age reference.

What that may leave is decision makers who don't always have a high enough level of digital or technical literacy.

Folks who are not competent in technology decisions and implementations being in positions of decision making and spending is the point I was trying to make.

Ever heard of the Peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) ?

Haha, have heard of that principle but not what it was called.

Careful with your line of reasoning.

There is a difference between "ageism", and "being honest about how hard some problems are to solve".

There are a lot of unbelievably brilliant 22-year-olds.

None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.

Doing something for 20 years does not necessarily make someone better at it than someone who’s done it for 5 years. Arguably doing something for that long could even make you worse.

> None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.

Exactly! If you’ve been doing that for 20 years I do not want to work with you, since you are apparently perfectly content with that status quo.

I’ve been doing it for two years and it’s already too much. My highest priority is fixing their chronically useless requirements.

I’m glad you’ve clarified as when you said that it sounded like you’re astonished at the level of apathy and/or incompetence you’re surrounded with and I was worried for a second that you’ve just too little experience to understand that your predecessors have very likely been trying for much of that time to push back against the status quo and have better ideas implemented, likely swimming upstream against resistance you’re wholly unaware of.

But it’s clearly not that after all, which is a relief - I’m glad it’s just a case of everyone else that’s come before you being useless.

Boomers, am I right?

Is it just me, or are you being needlessly sarcastic here?

The resistance is ridiculous, but it’s still the single most valuable thing we can be doing to improve our project delivery.

Given the current division of people that care/not care (or are disinclined to act on it?). It is entirely likely that none of my predecessors did.

That said, if they had been doing it (and made any progress), I really wonder what the previous situation was. Maybe there just weren’t any requirements at all?

From experience I would suggest that it's very likely they had a very clear idea of where the problems were and tried to solve them, but found that they were not a priority upstream.

It's still an absurd situation, but I doubt very much it's the result of apathy - or at the very least the result of apathy from your direct predecessors.

There are certainly a lot of 22 year olds that have been led to believe that they’re unbelievably brilliant.

I’m sure some of them are. I’m sure a lot of 22 year olds were brilliant in the 80’s and 90’s too.

Unless your thesis is that there’s been a sudden upsurge in the proportion of superintelligent earthlings in the last 25 years I’m unsure what your point is.

> Edit: Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Sounds plausible but I sadly only observe the opposite of management consulting “drying up”

I agree on observing the opposite.

My hope is leaders with tech backgrounds can grow into that space. Its far more lucrative than most software only endeavours.

It doesn’t sound like that at all. “channel their inner Steve Jobs” sounds like everyone is staring at the clouds and practising some blue sky thinking, while the OP you replied to is talking about managing legacy systems, old data and bringing along an existing work force into using a new system. These are all the diametric opposite of “Steve Jobs architecting”.

I can expand on the Steve Jobs reference.

Apple is about creating usable technology for the masses, not the few.

Apple also simplified access to legacy systems, like buying music and making it digital. Or maybe using your watch or phone to pay.

IPhone is geared for ease of use for anyone to adopt, including folks who arent super tech saavy..

Apple's innovation is charging a premium to create beginners in tech adoption who might not be experts at tech, who want yo feel empowered by everything just working.

As someone that’s been using Apple products for a few decades I don’t think I can agree that they make “for the masses, not the few”.

Their market share figures would show that if that’s their aim then they are failing. IMO Apple makes premium products for a specific kind of customer and have little regard for issues like backwards compatibility. Which is absolutely fine. But probably not a model you’d want the government to follow.

45% of Americans use an iPhone. That would require users across the economic spectrum.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-...

It's users, as a percentage of mobile phone users (80% of population). So if a family have one iPhone, they can all count as users.

iPhone only bring affordable to richer people who mostly want the latest means lots of second hand items. I'll warrant Android users at the lower end keep their phones longer.

When thinking of Apple, I wonder..

Was the Apple II for beginners? School children?

Was the original Macintosh easier for beginners to use than other computers?

Was the Apple Quicktime Pro one of the first digital cameras that anyone could relatively pick up and start using?

Was the iPod the first digital music player that just worked to buy and download music from end to end?

Was iPhone.. despite arriving as a smartphone a decade after Palm, etc, was the first usable smartphone for the masses?

Was iPad the first tablet that also just worked? Seems like anyone who can't use a laptop can use their finger on an iPad.

How about that AppleTV? Can anyone use it? It's easier than my AndroidTV.

What about that Apple watch, how many people who were new to wearables had it as their first? Seems popular with the masses.

Experts are usually the few, not the masses.

There's no doubt apple charges a premium. Their devices on average last 4-6 years, longer than the Android I'm typing this on.

Rather than being first, they do try to get it right for the masses. I'm not a happy Apple user, or fan with the keyboard fiasco. Apple's history though remains what it is.. easier to adopt by beginners.

>Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Could say the exact same thing about tech recruiters

> and use Excel as the height of their digital literacy

In Germany we literally use fax and enter data by hand. A project that successfully moved things to an emailing Excel sheets based workflow would be absolutely revolutionary.

My former business partner back in the Web 1.0 days (hey D) had remarkable experience in scaling large systems. Studied under ast. Rolled his own ETL language to power primary research for a Nobel-prize winning social scientist. Could sound like Werner Herzog on demand. He’s the kind of man anyone shuts up and listens to. While helping him clean up a failed $25mm Deloitte project circa 1996, we got drunk in a Manhattan bar. Sometime around martini #3 he said:

“The next 10 years of software will be very boring. The entire field of CS will be employed turning paper process into digital process, at great cost. Almost all of these projects will fail because Americans are admirably earnest but tragically over-confident. You underestimate paper.”

“Good money for us though. But have a hobby to occupy your mind or you will be miserable. Zum Wohl.”

And that’s how I ended up order an ill-considered 4th martini. He was correct, although the interregnum was perhaps 2-3 years shorter than he predicted. Or 15 years longer depending on how one judges these things.

That's very well put. And likely where a lot of companies remained. It would be interesting to see how the pandemic affected those operations.

No longer true:

https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/corona-test-digital-...

And it wasn't really true before either, most of the Ämter used the Demis system.

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