I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!
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.