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Comment by coherentpony | Hacker News Reader

No shit. This whole ordeal has been nothing short of a complete and utter fucking disaster. And how much did the government pay to have this work done [1]? This is procurement at its finest. The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up who would have done a much better job utilising scalable technologies.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...

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I rather think that depends on what technological expertise the the start-up brought to bear on the problem.

I understand it's chic to think that Healtcare.gov is "just another website", especially among a certain crowd who think that all development is web development, and best done on a MacbookPro using RoR/node/<functional language Y>/Go + <insert fad-of-the-day JS framework here>. It's a mistaken impression, though, because we aren't talking about some from-scratch system. We're talking about communication with and between a lot of legacy systems requiring what is almost certainly a frankenstein-like nightmare of patchwork APIs that dive into programming languages and styles hipster 20-somethings at hot S.F. Start Up X wouldn't understand because it's beneath them (I'm exaggerating and generalizing here for effect--this isn't to impugn all 20-somethings, start-ups, etc.).

Honestly I don't think there is any contractor who could have pulled this project off flawlessly, or even very much better than the group of misfits who did Healthcare.gov did, just because of the sheer complexity of the project compounded with the increased politically-motivated interference from government officials that comes with such high-profile projects.

> Honestly I don't think there is any contractor who could have pulled this project off flawlessly

A few flaws could be excused but the site was a disaster.

> or even very much better than the group of misfits who did Healthcare.gov

In just a couple of months, the current contractor group was able to clean up most of the mess and improve the site dramatically. In just two months! Imagine what they could have pulled off if the group was put together earlier.

The were able to clean up and improve an existing system, yes. That doesn't imply anything about their abilities to have created it from the ground up.

To me, it implies they have even more ability than if I saw them build it from the ground up. They were able to read the garbage written by the other developers and make something useful out of it. Pretty impressive!

Have you actually used the site? I tried to register, it's a complete joke. It crashed twice and eventually I got to a point where I literally could not figure out what I was supposed to do next. I mean, I'm a programmer and I couldn't figure it out. Everyone else I talked to who tried to use it had the same experience.

The site literally does not function, this has nothing to do with integrations.

> The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up

And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.

>And if it failed

Fixed that for you.

Oh, this project would have failed anyway. A lot of the work is integration with backwards systems, in a political environment. Point me at the startup engineers that are interested in working on that.

Sure, a mythical online website built from scratch in Node.js with a Mongo backend can be out together by a bunch of college graduates, but without talking to a dozen other systems this site is not going to do much, and as soon as you take people out of the comfort zone of shiny toys we'll see how long the remain interested when you end up in SOAP and CORBA or are screen scraping mainframes. The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.

I think thats unfair.

Interaction with legacy systems is all the future has left, plus its a problem - and the most elegant hack to scrape the aging DoJ mainframe wins the prize.

No, its clear public data architecture has to change.

... The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.

But this is a space that could be disrupted (albeit not easily). And isn't Clever[1] trying to do something similar in the education space?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/clever-y-combinator-student-i...

Would you take that contract? I sure wouldn't. Something this big, and this failure prone, and which is being used as a political football besides...no amount of money is worth that.

I'd be willing to try for 20M.

Worth a shot.

I have worked on government IT projects in a country that has 160 times less citizens and I would not take this kind of project for this kind of money.

That's because you're missing the point:

The damned thing doesn't have to work, it just has to make the administration look good. The White House gets to look forward-thinking in rolling out this amazing new technology to help fix healthcare, and they get to look good by being the underdog victim fighting against the bloated government contractor that tried to defraud the taxpayer.

All you have to do is take the money, play the patsy, and everything will be fine.

Oh yes, I am way too dumb for that.

And too principled! :)

This shouldn't even be about politics. Amazon serves millions of people a day and their site works perfectly (even if it is horribly designed) every time I've tried to use it. Healthcare.gov is used once by everyone (that needs coverage) to pick a plan and pay for it.

People are fucking dying because they can't get coverage.

Amazon.com came online 20 years ago and has been slowly iterated upon and changed by thousands of employees since then. Slightly different.

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