Hacker News Reader

Comment by sehugg | Hacker News Reader

by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site

Uh, the reasons government IT projects are typically huge wasteful boondoggles are not because programmer salaries are too high or programmer talent is mediocre.

View on HN

I was puzzeled over that number too, as putting up a site like that, even if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$. I went through to the linked artice, and appeareantly, most of it went for consultants. I mean there are consultants out there that are worth their money, and I bet the site is kai-zen optimized very nicely, even though I can't tell, but 327 million $ is quite a hump for that website. The main problem seems to be that government contracting is not a regular market, else joe's jquerry shack would have ourrun and outpaced accenture in both cost and quality.

I am also guessing there is a backend component that isn't on yet?

Additionally, gov't is traditionally entirely unwilling to agree to strict requirements, so require vast overbidding

i guess there is a backend there that isn't accounted for yet. I went with 5k for web design and 15k for 3 pretty average servers (using jeff atwoods specs as a general number, where he comes out to $2,750 for raw server cost without allocation), but in retrospect, 3 average servers could be somewhat small for a site like that.

"if you are buying the servers from scratch and hire a first rate web dev, shouldn't cost more than 10-20k$"

this number is just as absurd as the $327 million.

At $125/hour and $5000 for servers, $10-20k could be spent up in a couple weeks or so. That seems pretty reasonable, and certainly not as absurd as $327 million, which would amount to about 1200 years of FTE effort.

If you were the government or a big company with a reputation would you call up 1 guy and say "you've got a few weeks and 120/hr, make a site and well run it in our data enter"?

Think of all the things that can go wrong! Security, PII, etc.

Ah, I thought your remark was suggesting that it should be even cheaper than $10-20k.

> The main problem seems to be that government contracting is not a regular market

I have to wonder if it would be come a more regular market if companies weren't required to drug-test all of their employees in order to do more than $100,000 of Federal contract work [1]. I'm sure their are companies out there that would prefer not to compromise their employees' privacy for the sake of work they might not need.

[1]: http://www.nfib.com/business-resources/business-resources-it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com