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Comment by penguindev | Hacker News Reader

"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....

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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.

> The more competent workers will want to rewrite everything

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

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.

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

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.

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