Ask HN: Thoughts on what's plaguing the Obamacare site?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6586705

by jtemplin • 13 years ago

3 1 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

hga• 13 years ago

The government took way too long to get started "bending metal", it had the inexperienced/no experience on this scale HHS Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services government bureaucrats be the integrator for this 50+? contractor effort, per the NYT "In the last 10 months alone, government documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the exchange seven times." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327), those changes continued through the last week before the launch, and full testing obviously was delayed until that last week. Underlying their inexperience, evidently CMMS didn't see a need for bottleneck monitors, given that we've heard of them being put in place post-launch.

And refused to listen to the people waving red flags started no later than spring of this year, when one of these bureaucrats changed his goal/desire from a "First World" website to one that wasn't "Third World"....

So the customer completely screwed up, including launching when the techies told them it couldn't possibly work. Add to that the usual inefficiencies of contracting, plus government contracting, I can't see how this project ever had the slightest chance of success. Especially with them now talking about a "tech 'surge'", obviously no one in authority has even bothered to read The Mythical Man Month"; I just don't see these people as being used to the hard constraints of the real world.

Subsequently, as related in that NYT article, CMMS appears to be quietly panicking (we've heard that independently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467), and maybe not so quietly when per the NYT article they proposed 3 days after launch to through away the current identity system. Per that article, they have been consumed with working with the White House and hopes to have a plan for the contractors ready by Thursday; decisiveness is not part of their vocabulary.

So as things stand now, I wouldn't expect anything really working in 2014. I expect serious changes as this drags on for months, who know knows about 2014, but as for now....

Ask HN: Thoughts on what's plaguing the Obamacare site?

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