Will Obamacare get its act together in time?

[rah]

Ok, a lot of website glitches. Same **** happens every time a bunch of politicians try and organize a major IT project, especially when the other half are adamant about sabotaging it in any way possible.

While the repugs can be blamed for a lot a crap, blaming them for the glitches is a bit extreme.

[kentonio]

While the repugs can be blamed for a lot a crap, blaming them for the glitches is a bit extreme.

To be fair I was just being snippy, the administration deserve all the contempt for being incapable of running a website. You'd think somewhere in the billions of dollars budget someone could have knocked a few hundred grand free to hire a decent web tech designer.

[kentonio]

Oh that was good timing, just went to HP and there's an article about this very thing. Appears the programmers just got totally swamped with unrealistic deadlines, last second changes and all the other things that usually happen when non-tech people are allowed to interfere in running tech projects. I recognize basically all of these thing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...usaolp00000003

[rah]

From the article.

The government spent at least $394 million in contracts to build the federal health care exchange and the data hub. Those contracts included major awards to Virginia-based CGI Federal Inc., Maryland-based Quality Software Services Inc. and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.

That was scary. (and I manage software development teams) Even at 100 dollars an hours that's one hell of a lot of hours of management programming and testing.
Even if you subtract 100 million for infrastructure.

Yes the government is quite incompetent.

[DinoDoc]

That was scary. (and I manage software development teams)

Can I ask you a question then? The New York Times is reporting that the site as a whole apparently contains 500 million lines of code, 5 million of which apparently have to be rewritten. The Admin wants this done and functional by November 1st. Does that deadline sound remotely realistic to you given your experience?

[rah]

No

[rah]

And as far as I'm concerned '500 million lines of code' geeze. This sounds like the outcome of the old 9 women trying to have a baby in one month type of thinking. It takes one hell of a lot of programmers working with no coordination to generate that amount of code. And even then, if you have to rewrite 1% of code you're still talking total retesting. Testing takes longer than coding.

[DinoDoc]

And as far as I'm concerned '500 million lines of code' geeze.

A large bank’s computer system is typically about one fifth that size, yes? I'd be shocked if they have it finished before the end of the year.

[rah]

When I worked for a LARGE insurance company, the system was no where near that size.

[Imran Siddiqui]

From the article.


That was scary. (and I manage software development teams) Even at 100 dollars an hours that's one hell of a lot of hours of management programming and testing.
Even if you subtract 100 million for infrastructure.

Yes the government is quite incompetent.

The problem with government contracts. Instead of being able to pick the best service for the price, it is required to pick the lowest bidder - and the lowest bidder may really suck. (Of course, the low bidder rule is to prevent graft, but still)

[regexcellent]

Rah why do you keep using the term repugs? I've never seen anyone else refer to them as that. It's kind of stupid.

[rah]

Demorats and repugs shows my disdain for both parties. Have no issue with you thinking it's stupid so don't worry about it.

[Hauldren Collider]

The problem with government contracts. Instead of being able to pick the best service for the price, it is required to pick the lowest bidder - and the lowest bidder may really suck. (Of course, the low bidder rule is to prevent graft, but still)

That's actually not the problem with government contracting. The anti-discrimination rules make it essentially impossible to hire competent people. And not actually because you have to hire black people, before the screams of racist come wailing in from Kentonio. It's because you have to do things like log every damn thing about a person to prove later that you aren't a closet racist, since the burden of proof is on you--this is an enormous expense. Plus, you have to hold jobs open for at least a month so that disabled veterans get a chance and stuff, by which time smart people have found other jobs. It's a mess. And it makes it inevitable that the government is simply incapable of pulling off a project like the obamacare exchange successfully, even disregarding the fact that the government sucks at running commercial services, which is why it usually leaves that up to the private sector, except when it's feeling power hungry, like now.

[Hauldren Collider]

I almost died laughing when I heard about the "tech surge". They've made every software development mistake in the book, now they're making the biggest and the oldest. This is the mythical man month. I thought they had a chance to fix this, but now that Obama announced a "tech surge", I think we can start coming up with epitaphs. Throwing more bodies at the exchange is going to make it so much worse. It doesn't even matter how smart they are, although this being the government, we can be pretty sure they won't be.

[DinoDoc]

I almost died laughing when I heard about the "tech surge".