Google, Oracle Workers Enlisted for Obamacare 'Tech Surge' | Hacker News Reader

Google, Oracle Workers Enlisted for Obamacare 'Tech Surge'

bloomberg.com

64 pointssmaili46 comments

If I just learned that a government spent time and resources to tap my fiber-optic network and record the internal operations of my company, I'd be damned if I would then lend said government some of my prized technicians to pull their asses out of a fire of their own making.

But that's just me.

I wonder what the end-result of this "surge" will be, besides the obvious (a website that is declared "working" whether or not the processes behind it are): will we start to hear horror stories of the mess behind the scenes of healthcare.gov, after real professionals get to see the sausage factory in operation?

> will we start to hear horror stories of the mess behind the scenes of healthcare.gov, after real professionals get to see the sausage factory in operation?

I strongly suspect - guarantee, even - that there are parts of Google and Oracle (...along with everywhere else) where the codebases are god-awful messes, or 'sausage factories'. It comes with the territory.

If anything does come out it will probably be after the fact, and anonymized in some way (so, on TheDailyWTF). True professionals tend not to go around telling everyone about how awful the previous contractor was - that's why they're professionals.

No disagreement there: every company has their own pile of technical dirt swept under the rug.

Alternatively, if I just learned that a government did something that I strongly disagreed with, I'd probably be able to internalize the reality that the government is pretty big and that its probably better to vocally critique some aspects of it rather than refuse to help people get the medical care they need.

Saying you won't help the Department of Health and Human Services because you don't like the NSA is about like saying you won't buy a Ford because your last Chrysler was a lemon. The government is not a single entity. There's a single chain of command, but there are thousands of different cultures.

It's a combination of fake outrage and compartmentalization.

Does Larry Page blame Obama for what is going on regarding the NSA? Probably not, if I had to guess, much like a lot of his supporters don't. For Google, it's likely they're perfectly happy to separate the healthcare initiative off from the espionage scandal. Th US Government is, after all, truly massive in scope, with many fiefdoms the size of small countries economically.

Oracle does a lucrative government business. The CIA project that helped them get off the ground is even where they got their name. So if, for example, the NSA were spying on Oracle, they might be miffed, but they're not about to do anything to harm those big juicy government contracts.

It's not about helping "the government", it's about fixing a problem which is going to keep millions of people from getting decent healthcare.

The idea that someone would refuse to help get more people insured in a country where health care financing will for at least the next 10 years depend entirely on insurance because of something the NSA did is emblematic of how annoying nerds like us are when it comes to public policy.

That'll show 'em! All 10-15 people in the government who might get fired over Obamacare, along with the 10 MILLION people who will spend even more time uninsured. You get 'em!

So it's perfectly okay for the government to play the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" and other nonsense games, but here it is "emblematic of how annoying nerds like us are when it comes to public policy"?

I also really don't think a goddamn website stands in the way of affordable universal health care. Implement a Weberian bureaucracy and have it run on good old paper and mail, that is how its done everywhere else, and by the looks of this IT disaster we'd come out on top, jobs and everything!

No, and yes.

Are you going to be paying taxes this year? I don't know who people think pays for the NSA, but its the money we pay in taxes every year.

I encourage all americans on here who will owe taxes for 2013 to take a stand and stop paying taxes until the FISC is dissolved as a matter of principle.

It's ridiculous the number of HN members ready to cast the first stone because they judge someone else's leverage to be sufficient that they should be taking a stand. It's the exact same phenomenon that gives us zero approval for congress yet astronomical rates of incumbency every election.

If you aren't willing to withhold tax payments, clearly you at least recognize there is some line at which you can actively support a government that is engaged in something very wrong because the benefit of not doing so would be tiny compared to the harm. Now imagine that instead of funding a tiny, tiny portion of the government, your support would instead be helping millions of people to find insurance coverage.

- We cannot allow our rights to be ignored.

- There are millions of people forgoing medical treatment every day because they don't have insurance.

- There are thousands of people going into personal bankruptcy every day because they don't have insurance.

Luckily we can work on fixing more than one thing at once. The idea that we should ignore one until the other is fixed is ludicrous, and I would argue a net immoral act if put into practice.

> If you aren't willing to withhold tax payments, clearly you at least recognize there is some line at which you can actively support a government that is engaged in something very wrong because the benefit of not doing so would be tiny compared to the harm.

You don't think that someone might be unwilling to break the law for a cause because prison isn't such a nice place?

You could always defund the government by giving your taxable income to charity. But I expect most people think they deserve their income more than the government doesn't deserve it.

it's not just a matter of desserts. Unlike corporations, which are taxed on a profit basis (i.e. income less costs), individuals are taxed on an income basis. So if you give 100% of your income to charity, there is nothing left for food, shelter, etc.

Don't give 100% away, just give the taxable part away. Don't most countries have a personal tax-free allowance?

While universal healthcare is a noble goal, I have a feeling that insurance reform will not stop costs from going out of control.

Rising healthcare costs is because of the artificially limited supply by the AMA limiting the number of MDs that can graduate each year.

Do we really need to lower our standards to get more affordable healthcare? I don't think healthcare quality will drop just because doctors won't need to spend a small fortune getting through medical school and then sleeping 4 hours a day during 6 years of residency.

There is a shortage of med workers, not tech workers.

With all due respect, you're showing emotional bias. The fact that the government can do and is doing things very few programmers could even imagine, while spending untold hundreds of millions on a site a 13 year old could have built better, is little more than frustrating, especially when you consider that we paid for it.

Color me crazy, but I think supporting a growing surveillance state is just as bad -- if not worse -- than refusing to assist in providing healthcare services.

Shall the calves in the hutch be content with their fate as veal, as long as the food arrives regularly and in plentiful quantities?

Is that an argument or the lyrics of a Tool song?

The "government" is very large, and should really rather be though of as many big companies. This health care work is really zero percent related to anything any DOD entity touches. Besides, just because a government can do some bad, doesn't mean it can't be doing good somewhere else at the same time...

"Adding more workers to a late software project makes it later"

see the Mythical Man Month.

I wonder if there's an additional scaling factor for gigantic government cluster fucks.

Yep, obamacare is doing nothing to provide more doctors.. just more computerized bureaucracy to boost IT salaries. But I hope we all know the government doesn't give a fuck about your health, or privacy....

True, but replacing (potentially) incompetent workers with very competent workers will probably help, as long as they're allowed autonomy.

Actually, no. Again, read the book. It doesn't work that way. The more competent workers will want to rewrite everything setting the whole project back. Many times, staying with the incompetent crew is better even if it means things move slow as molasses and the final product is buggy as hell.

I can imagine that's a very common scenario, but for a project as big as this one, and with people who are very used to working on massive projects, I would hope they wouldn't try and rewrite everything and would just try to get everything into a working and stable state.

> The more competent workers will want to rewrite everything

That's at odds with describing them as "competent".

Right. In this case we're assuming the people hired are very experienced developers, who understand systems integration and large scale projects like this.

Not exactly, what if the existing code/architecture has inherit security flaws in a high value Healthcare system? Something that competent workers won't just let exist to "finish" the job.

I continue to believe you do not understand what a competent developer is. A competent developer will do what is necessary to accomplish the job they are given, in this case making an already-launched service work as quickly as possible. That may include unfortunate workarounds for security issues pending a real fix.

I can see the Fox News headlines already. "Not even the nation's best tech companies could save Obamacare."

Fully open source the pricing tables, and we can do the rest in a matter of days.

Nothing the 'data hub' is doing is actually necessary to "help" the American people price out an insurance policy, and decide if they want to buy it or pay the "fee" instead. I think the allure of feasting on all that Big Data and tying all their systems together for more efficient error correction, de-duping, and mining for "other purposes" was too much to resist.

thetylerhayes mentioned http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/insurance_plans?zip_code=3670... which is a good example of what's easily possible. It's not much more work to ask for household income, birthdates, and tobacco use, and calculate the exact cost.

It's trivial to take a given household income and show the resulting subsidy. Personally I think checking for Medicaid eligibility is out of scope, but it's not black magic either, just the questions you would have to ask would vary per state.

If they would open source the APIs and schemas for submitting completed applications to the insurance companies, then starting from scratch a team of 5 could have the whole system online before Thanksgiving.

The more this drama unfolds, the more I think it's going to make for a great book for nerds. A big-ticket IT project, behind on schedule, lots of political flak, all the usual dysfunctional behaviors that happen with off-the-rails projects, the VP just called us all geeks, now Oracle and Google are parachuting in "alpha teams"

Sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy book for liberal nerds. Big Government program on the rocks. Select team comes in and saves the day. Hell, might even be a movie in there somewhere.

This is really smart of Google and Oracle. By lending their engineers over to Healthcare.gov, their engineers are going to get the best healthcare systems training possible. It's the best domain knowledge enhancement program available. Healthcare.gov is attempting something no other start up in the nation has the opportunity or capacity of accomplishing, because of the sheer scope of it.

If I worked in a healthcare start up I would be making every effort to get contracted.

> Healthcare.gov is attempting something no other start up in the nation has the opportunity or capacity of accomplishing, because of the sheer scope of it.

Opportunity? Indeed, no.

Capacity? Oh my yes. Just look at what @MMWasser was able to build in the few days since healthcare.gov's launch based on healthcare.gov's and related sites' data: http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/

Plenty of talented engineers are just waiting to pounce on any and all data and opportunity made available to revolutionize this space. There's more than enough capacity.

Anyone know how to get in on that? :) Being a senior level enterprise java developer in the health care sphere, I'd be interested in helping out.

I imagine Obama calls you. Most of these guys may have been on his re-election engineering team.

The "tech Surge" will be no doubt meet resistance by the "Talebug" terrorists. This war will not be won in our lifetime (or the lifetime of this thread at any rate).

Ok so we have a buggy website and this is going too be fixed by using outsourced engineers. Not exactly a solution and for all we know Oracle could send the same engineers that made mistakes in java, not impossible.

Just so long as the website does not start insisting upon a toolbar to be installed, then nobody will get any more upset pressing F5 repeatedly to check if the site is down. If anything this website is suffering a bit from what I call fashion denial of service, bit of a fotm.

More engineers make a project later. So this is bad news.

"Hey, uh, Google... We are sorry we secretly stole information from your personal networks and spied on you and your users activities. Can you be good pals and help us get our site working?" — what a joke. If only Obama dedicated as many resources as he does to his spying programs, then the site might have made its deadline flawlessly.

Anything about too many cooks in the kitchen?

I'm just wondering how they can so straightfacedly say that it will take one month to fix what is clearly not an easy problem...

What platforms is it hosted on? Did that have anything to do with who is helping out?

In light of recent events, I do have to wonder what their motive is to lend assistance. Kickbacks? Future contracts? A promise not to embarrass their corporate officers with information snagged by the NSA?

My guess is checks. Very large checks.

i'd speculate that Google is brought in because it is good PR, and Oracle, well, it sounds like healthcare.gov backend is running something like 4-6 node RAC (most probably Exadata). Good luck to them as they would really need it :)

Google SREs have a lot of experience managing very complex systems with very little downtime. There're certain architectural patterns and practices you can use if you want to keep a large distributed website highly-available.

Oracle I'd imagine is there for expertise with specific technologies.

Also, it's worth remembering that these are specific engineers who volunteered, and not their employers. So a lot is really who was willing to do it.

At what point do we stop handing over ideas to the spaz for implementation?

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