wmhartnett.com
My wife has a friend who barely made it out of high school, believes in psychics, believes that the U.S. gives an annual payment to England for our freedom (this was revealed on the 4th. I spit out my beer laughing, but then I realized she was serious). This person works as an Information Assurance person in charge of making sure software is "secure." She knows nothing about software, but she has passed a few tests, courtesy of prep courses which guarantee you can get the cert. Because she was in the Air Force for 6 months (she got pregnant and was honorably discharged a couple of months after her first duty), she is a veteran and is therefore fully qualified to classify software as secure. Or in reality, defense contractors have to meet quotas for hiring veterans, and they put her in the easiest butts in seats job they could find, IT security.
This, my friends, is the system you have to deal with in the federal fucking government.
Think about it like a government employee. If you do your job perfectly well, nobody notices. Despite the bureaucracy, despite unclear success criteria, despite insane budgeting. Nobody notices. That's just what's expected.
When something goes wrong, though, you get hammered. God help you if something comes to the attention of the public or makes the news. Nobody will take the time to understand the context; everybody just looks for the most plausible person to blame. If that's you, then you've got a black mark for the rest of your career. Welcome to the basement!
It's the total opposite of a startup context. And in some ways it should be. But it does mean that government projects drown in red tape and politics and procedures up the wazoo. Which is absolutely a recipe for shitty software and overpriced contracts, whether you're in government or a megacorp.
I'm in startups for a reason, and I have a lot of sympathy and respect for the good people who keep plugging away in government despite the fucked-up incentives.
Personally, I'd feel much better about government-run healthcare than for-profit-insurer-run healthcare. At least with the government option, everybody works for me, either directly or indirectly. Plus, a bureaucrat's natural fear works in my favor.
That's why I'm torn on the whole thing. I think for-profit should be able to do it better, but the current system clearly isn't structured in a way that encourages it. I have no idea whether the devil I know is better or not, and it's a big decision.
There are occasional health system scandals in Australia and the UK, for example, but even with this everyone gets coverage. So why the US needs to drag its heels in this is beyond me.
But if you do think the public service will make a dog's breakfast over the whole thing, I'm all ears.
Great data and analysis here:
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-u...
However, to address your question directly, look at debt to GDP ratios:
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=GOV_DEBT
The US is in the middle of the pack. Countries with more sane health care systems and better levels of debt include Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Canada, Sweden, and Australia. I don't see any reason to believe that they're being driven bankrupt by their health care systems.
But individuals don't have the same out. Somebody who took a risk and failed may never get fired, but for somebody with ambition and vision, getting demoted to a pointless job with no power is worse than getting fired.
Wow, that's gotta be one of the most boneheaded govt policies I've heard of. Is this because of some kind of patriotic "duty" to keep veterans off the streets? In my experience, a lot of veterans would have ended up on the streets even if they hadn't joined the military - in fact, many joined the military specifically so they wouldn't end up on the streets.
From a brief skim of since-1974 stuff on the subject, it looks like much of it may result from bipartisan-coalition politics: you often see "disabled and veterans" joined together in laws and rulemaking as a group, probably as horsetrading where liberals get something pro-disabled, and conservatives get something pro-veteran.
My best friend for 20 years, who is probably the smartest and most capable guy I've ever known, graduated with a software engineering degree (and a crappy GPA due to his pursuit of non-school software stuff at the expense of his school projects). He happens to be black, and he couldn't get hired anywhere due to his GPA. He goes to DC, immediately gets interviews. Now, here's the funny part: These assholes who called him for phone interviews were asking, multiple times!, if he was indeed "African American"? One of the females who called him from a very,very large contractor I shall not name said the words, "ok, I was just confirming because you don't sound like it." (meaning she didn't think he sounded black.)My buddy, ever the cleverest guy around, responded "I'sa do the numbahs too mastah." LOL
Coming up with the idea and getting it approved takes months. Wrapped into the project of creating the web site will be the "what should we create" phase and dozens of iterations on design and IA, which takes most of the work. There will be 20+ people involved in this process and one line of code hasn't even been written for the first 6 months of the project. The idea they had last week is different than the idea they are talking about this week, which will be different than the idea they will talk about next week. Imagine this goes on for 6 months.
Once the code is written, testing, security, infrastructure setup and all the sign-offs on that also takes months.
One person full time for a year will cost IBM $250,000 in real costs (salary, benefits, overhead) that they bill out to the Federal Government at $500,000 per person per year. Can I imagine 25 people working on this for one year, where only 3 of them are developers? And the rest of the money is hard costs and infrastructure? Yes I can. Easily.
Sad though.
Things like high-contrast modes, adjustable font sizes, naming conventions (for screen readers, etc) all have to be taken into account on EVERY dialog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...
I wouldn't be surprised if the $33mm price is correct ... but not 100% sure it is without spending more time looking around and, potentially, seeking further information through FOIA.
[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22467.wss
Is there anything else about the government any of you guys want to know about? I'm getting pretty good at FOIA'ing now.
I bet there are some _specific_ things that members of this community want to know (cost/sources of software, policy memos, etc.) that could be requested, received and processed in a more timely and useful fashion than if we just asked for "(asterisk).(asterisk)".
How about the cost of digging up that information? Or the effort to ensure each piece of information released is indeed safe for release? Or the effort to put it all together in a coherent set?
The government has a TON of records. Releasing them is not as simple as picking the "public" checkbox in the settings pane.
There might also be a general concern that if someone had access to the entire database of records, they could mine that database and start to infer other information that is not supposed to be known. This sort of tactic has been used in wars past. Compiling supply chain records to infer troop movements, for example.
I'd characterize your reply as concern trolling.
I've done my share of FOIA requests. I imagine I've heard most every excuse. Including "We lost the backup tapes."
Being charitable, the reason public records requests are hard, expensive to fulfill is because efficient records management is rare, making finding and retrieval difficult.
Someone may chime in suggesting CMS, workflow, sharepoint, whatever. Yea. If it was just that easy, everyone would be doing it.
My MuckRock username is 'TransparentByDefault' for a reason! :)
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/user/TransparentByDefault/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows/rfpez
... hopefully making it possible for vendors build government web projects with bids for less than $150k, instead of millions of dollars per web site.
http://www.cft.usma.edu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peiter_Zatko
Wouldn't this be something an mba would love anyway?
I'm sure somebody thinks this is an interesting challenge to tackle. The Uruguayan equivalent (AGESIC) did make a pretty nifty website for government procurement:
http://comprasestatales.gub.uy
explanation in Spanish:
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/Other/...
English translation (Google):
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=...
It's a good initiative, but it has the side effect of making my blood pressure rise when I see the awarded projects (all relatively transparent, but still bad contracts)
Conversely, fighting a bloated military by wasting money on IT boondoggles is not a strategy with a whole lot of long term potential IMO.
Defense my ass.
Never mind that we're taking about saving millions, while the last two wars each cost trillions. Or 100,000 Census Bureau websites as discussed in the article.
I don't know how much it cost to redesign the Federal Register, but federalregister.gov is one of the most usable, data-intensive sites around. Especially compared to what it used to be.
GAO.gov is also a hallmark in usability and information-taxonomy.
Ah i wasn't quite right. You can check out the full story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839137 sunlight labs was involved though.
The time frame is realistic considering poor original design, scope creep and federal government counterparts not being particularly quick in gettings things done (getting access/fighting through bureaucracy, etc).
So why would the federal government hire IBM over you; who can build a totally bug free version of this in half the time for half the price? IBM is: - Not likely go out of business anytime soon. - Not be unavailable for support work because you decided to start/join a startup - Not be able to deal with turnover since they have 100k+ employees, steady stream of college recruits and have been around for 100 years.
I can't believe this is the best they could do for $33 million. I just can't. They better have some slick stuff under the hood.
The government RFP and budgeting process is practically designed to prevent iteration and exploration. I can just hear Senator Blowhard of Cornhusk now: "So you want an unknown amount of money to keep building things until users are happy? That's an obvious boondoggle. Come back with a complete specification and put it out for bids from major contractors. We must be responsible with every penny of taxpayer money. Harrumph!"
So of course the software has terrible usability. Anything built like that will be terrible.
I don't doubt you, but do you have a reference for this?
These projects are handed out to reward the connected contractors, contributors and lobbyists that know how to work their target politicians and bureaucrats. There are ZERO incentives to do quality work. No one will lose his job over this software travesty. No one will get demoted. Rather than bemoan the waste of $32.9M on the job, politicians will simply push for higher taxes.
It's not totally impossible to do something agile in a government context, but it requires much more skill and trust from all involved. It's risky. And nobody outside the government is very understanding when things blow up, which happens more when you pick risky choices.
There isn't even a little bit of common sense or honesty in the way the government spends our money and people wonder why some of us are so adamantly opposed to raising taxes.
The fundamental reason why there's such a difference in efficiency between private efforts and government ones is this:
Private companies that are horrible at managing efficiency go out of business. People in private companies who are horrible at managing efficiency lose their jobs.
Government agencies that are horrible at managing efficiency get bigger budgets. Government employees who are horrible at managing efficiency rarely lose their jobs. The GSA scandal is the only one in recent history that has received any kind of real attention; and that's only because the idiots at the GSA made videos the went viral.
If you work for a company like Microsoft or IBM or Bank of America, you work in a bureaucracy at least as dysfunctional and Byzantine as an average US state. The Federal government is a whole other beast unto itself, but there are probably companies as screwy as they are too.
The fact that the private entity purges some folks doesn't make them better.
I assume it's the same outside of oil as well, but I know the most about that sector. Someone elsewhere in this discussion mentions that the NYTimes paywall cost $40m to implement!
And really, there's plenty of common sense and honesty in how governments spend money. Long ago I did a 6-month contract for a state government agency. I came away impressed. They were no more bureaucratic or wasteful than the large companies I've worked for. Like megacorps, many of the employees were clock-punchers who had all initiative beaten out of them. But many were sincere public servants who were getting good stuff done despite the bad incentives.
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/jobs/design-technology-fellow...
For their Design + Technology Fellowship, the deadline is this Friday.
You can complain about how government does things, or you can do something to fix it.
"American FactFinder works with Mozilla Firefox 3.6 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. Other browsers may not perform as expected. "
I wonder what it would cost to get support for Chrome.
You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :)
Guidewire at least has hundreds of people working on their insurance suite, some of then I've written to sound very capable and I really like their development process. They even created their own language based on the JVM (Gosu).
http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/
I'm sure CSC has some equally good people, but I haven't come across them :)
Personally, I thought Guidewire fit our needs very well (but I'm at the very bottom of the totem pole).
$33 million is 500 programmer man-years, minus a bit for overhead and profit. That should produce a lot of development.
I wonder if the $33 million cost includes the backend work done on the DADS II contract, or if that figure is just for the web frontend.
Where do you live where $66k/yr the total cost of employing a programmer? I don't know what IBM uses for its internal accounting, but based on what several other large tech companies use, $200k/yr is a decent guess (including salary+benefits+overhead). That'd mean 165 man-years, and only a fraction of those 165 would be programmers, since the contract also needs to pay for managers, sales, billing, legal, etc.
I have no idea why my parent comment was downvoted; I posted something based on my own (painful) experience and knowledge of what various other people I know made in programming jobs at the time.
There's actually a lot of programming jobs to be had in the midwest; courtesy of companies like Sprint, Oracle, credit card processing companies, large furniture service companies, and others.
Who knows how it breaks down. This exposes a vast amount of queryable census data to the public (something which would normally be regarded as a good thing, particularly if you are a startup which uses data).
But, to be sure, we can just punish the government for ever releasing any data unless it had such a high fee attached that only huge corporations could afford to pay it.
You should FOIA some kind of itemization of how that huge number breaks down, rather than running to the press with a sensationalized version tailored more to partisan politics than to informing the public
You really think $33 million is a reasonable number for building a web interface to existing data? Please, hire me for your next job.
And I'll just leave this here: https://github.com/ireapps/census
Apparently, he/she does.
I really wish I could understand why, though. Government corruption and waste hurts us all. Why do some people blow it off so easily?
I suspect a lot of people opposed to "government" and "taxes" in some general sense have ulterior motives, mostly relating to libertarian ideology ("taxation is theft", etc.) or just plain not liking to pay taxes... as opposed to honestly assessing the efficiency of different organizations.
By the time IBM Federal got the project and could start coding, some bureaucracy of failure had already decided that $33M was a fair price for the specifications that they provided.
I know people who work on government projects like these. I know how the subcontractors are chosen. I can almost guarantee that the subcontractor who received this job had some special "in" with the decision maker on the government side through nepotism, trips to strip clubs, cash payouts, political connections, or something.
I'd be willing to gamble real money on the following 2 facts about this project:
1) First thing IBM did was bill themselves for a couple hundred licenses of their own software.
2) The majority of the money was pissed away in meetings, and the majority of the dev time was spent on horrible multi-thousand line stored procedures for the ETL.
ftp://ftp2.census.gov/
My point being that the census data is independent of factfinder.
I haven't done anything in that area myself, but from what I hear second-hand it's a gravy train once you've made a sale to a Fortune500 company. Sales is hard, but once you've made the sale, you can bill millions for years for all sorts of reasons, some of which are even legitimate (given what they're asking you to do).
I would be interested in how software for large organizations, public or private, could suck less. A handful of startups have attempted to disrupt enterprise markets, but the going seems tough.
Hopefully that day will never come, it is enough that corporations are running the prisons.
I would also like to know how much said private corporation would charge. (But I don't have to wonder very much, because companies like Elsevier and Lexis/Nexis give a pretty good idea)
1) The people drawing up these contracts know nothing about software. They are often non-technical, elderly, upper-management types that have never written a line of code in their life. For all they know, adding a link to a webpage is a 2 week project.
2) Congress punishes federal agencies for not spending all of their budget each year by cutting their budgets. As a result, towards the end of the fiscal year every federal agency goes on a crap buying spree to make sure they've spent every last penny.
For instance, even though the "business" of the government (things like tax collection or tracking shipping containers) uses much less data than say a Google does, not only do they have a CIO, they have an entire battalion of CIOs. There's a whole club of just government CIOs. Each of those, of course, has a full staff. When contracts are paid, it usually goes through some completely different set of people than the people who actually receive the value.
If you're a company trying to help the government, you'd laugh your ass off if it weren't so damned sad. Your programmers -- and you gotta love this -- are all considered little cardboard cutouts, like cookies. If you have a problem to solve, the correct answer isn't what technology you would use to solve it. Usually that's outside your control anyway. The correct answer is how many "standard" programmers it would take to get it done. The quality of a "standard" programmer varies, but it's usually somebody with a few weeks of training and a desire to be anywhere but here. Many times your government partners are incompetent and a danger to themselves and others when it comes to technology. They want the moon but they don't want to take any political risk at all. I had one guy just flat out tell me: you guys make all the tough choices and if it goes well I'll take all the credit. If it fails it's all your fault. At least he was honest.
I could go on, but I don't want to get into a rant. Ever wonder how the IRS spent billions on upgrades with nothing to show for it? Or how the FBI's new case management system was a total Charlie Foxtrot? Geesh. 33.3 million is getting off lucky.
The thing is, the bureaucracy that you mentioned, it's not just the government. Too many large companies, especially non-IT ones, assume that you can complete a project by throwing 100 mediocre programmers at it.
The thing is that most private systems operating like this go broke -- unless they have lots of federal protection. You can't spend billions in the private sector without people noticing. The same is not true in the government sector. While all big organizations are like this, the government wastes money on IT at another level entirely. (I know, I've worked with lots of both government agencies and large organizations)
But, seriously, someone is going to write a thesis on gifs one day. It is "literally" an innovation in communications. While we currently associate gifs with memes, etc, you can see quite a few very creative ones on ffffound.com, for example. And,as you say, TheAtlantic now uses them.