NYT Paywall Cost $40 Million: How?

An anonymous reader submits this musing from Philip Greenspun's blog: "Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on?" Maybe the folks behind CityTime were free on weekends.

Comments

Large organization doing something simple

[Anrego]

I can actually see how this happens. Large organizations spending millions and taking years to do something a small team could whip up (and probably do a better job of) in a few months.

Different team sizes are required for different tasks. Some companies get this and put small teams together and have flexible processes that can scale to project size. Other companies can only do things one way, and that’s where you end up with insanity such as this.

You end up with layers and layers of process controlling huge unwieldy teams. You spend months just drafting the process by which you’ll operate under, and then it needs to be reviewed and this is before development even begins! You end up with 5 layers of management, each providing no real value to anything... but adding lots of time and cost.

You’ll need to gather metrics of course, so you need to figure out what metrics you need, and how you will analyse them, and how they will feed back into the dev process. And of course you’ll need someone to actually facilitate all this with some kind of metric crunching tool (which has to be bought and admined as well).

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[headhot]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[fruey]

Two well identified principles at work here (and the bigger an organisation, the more likely they are to happen, especially without strong leadership)

1. Parkinson's law : basically, work spreads out to fill the time that was earmarked to complete a project
2. Brooks' law : Adding people to a project increases lateness, because the number of communication channels to manage increases as a square of the number of people on a project

Only very sound management and trusting delegation - along with having a reasonably competent project team in the first place - can make things happen quickly.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[rwven]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

QFT. In my experience it seems like, for the most part, a small, highly skilled, highly focused team can accomplish at least as much (or in some cases far more) than any large team of developers/architects. Decisions are easier, faster, and cheaper to make when you have a group of people with industry experience and know-how. The amount of code needing to be laid down for most web projects really isn't THAT large....especially when it comes to a project like this NYT example.

I also think (and this probably goes without saying around here) that a top-heavy management structure is an instant doubling (or probably worse) of time and budget for any project. I was on a development team once that had twice as many people-management and project-management positions as there were developers, and it was an absolute nightmare. Developers ended up sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for someone to actually make a decision and call down the order to act.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

another consultant here (ACN)

no it can't. at least not if it requires any requirement analysis. (which is usually the biggest part - figuring out what end-users and clients need)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[fruey]

"any project, no matter how big" can be split into sub-lots which can be done by 6 people... but may take a lot of time if the same six people have to install in several different countries, or install hundreds of machines for infrastructure :)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Chrisq]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

There are probably a few exception, but add two or three good testers (who should not be the implementers) and I think that would cover 99% of projects

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[grouchyDude]

Please do not save me a seat on the space shuttle you build.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[PsyciatricHelp]

I actually use to work for the Times as a tech and all I can say is, man you nailed it.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[dlingman]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

I guess you don't have any kids then. (What am I saying. This is slashdot.)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[bjourne]

Hah requirement analysis! Aka doing a lot of mind numbing paper work that if you are lucky the engineers are able to ignore and still produce a quality product. Or, if you're not so lucky, have to follow it because clueless managers don't know how software design works resulting in releasing something which is a veritable disaster. People are notoriously bad at reasoning about abstract things, especially if they don't have the technical know-how on how those things really work, which is why "requirement analysis" is a waste of time.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[zimtmaxl]

I do not know anything about the NYT. But I have seen large European corporations: 5 layers of management: 3-4 of these layers doing nothing but exchanging and adjusting project plans (using Power Point!) with each other - and of course: finding arguments to increase their project's budgets. And of course making a lot of fuss about their busyness. I have also heard of a project which needed to cut costs. This is what they did: add another one or two managers, reduce the staff of developers (who do the actual work) by two and cut all others' hourly wages. If a project has a good manager, that is great! But unfortunately my experience tells me that for every great manager there are about 20 managers who act like a trainee.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point Windows Vista. *ducks*

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of Project Management leadership. Any basic course of MIS would have anyone educated in IT should evaluate at every junction the cost and ROI of a project. Obviously if there were people there that knew this, the top brass ignored it. This occurs when the Top Brass usually are too focused on the end result and are convinced of its perfection once delivered will answer all questions. Unfortunately, the bottom line dollars get skipped.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[jimbrooking]

Agreed. Long before most of you were born, i.e., in the 1960s-70s, it was a given that if IBM told you (a customer) that they were putting another 100 people to work on a piece of late software, they were really telling you the project had been killed. And of course there's the classic Mythical Man Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month) which, of course, no one reads any more.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[wisdom_brewing]

Don't be so insulting to trainees!

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Shikaku]

I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

Linux

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[dkleinsc]

I should point out that the NYT Paywall is apparently a much more complex beast than a simple "pay up to see the articles". What they're trying to do is allow search engines, Twitter, and other social media to drive traffic to them, but at the same time not allow people to regularly read their content for free.

My guess as to the approximate cost breakdown:
- consulting fees to convince the top brass to go along with this plan even though the last attempt failed miserably: $20 million
- project management and business analysis: $10 million
- profits for the purchase manager's brother-in-law's IT contracting firm: $9 million
- 8 developers and 2 testers to do the actual work: $1 million
- Watching online readership plummet again: Priceless.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[SharpFang]

Prerequisite: the team must be equipped with powertools to cut through the red tape.

Say, open line to the CEO who just says "yes" to anything they say and authority to fire whoever stops them from performing their task.

Depending on company structure, 10-60% of the time of any "revolutionary" change is spent actually developing the change, the remainder is asking, waiting, begging, urging, pressing, explaining, escalating and generally overcoming people who while aware of the necessity of the change and futility of their resistance, will resist the change as much as they can (or see it as the opportunity to exercise their decision-making power, which is totally unneeded and unwelcome there but by no means anyone could ever notice that.)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

kids are usuallly something which gets done by teams of 2 people.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

The six monkeys with typewriters living an infinite amount of time theory?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[sarhjinian]

I think you've pretty much explained the last ten years at Nokia.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The depressing thing about the "big budget" development efforts is that the bigger the budget, the bigger the likelihood that it will fail.

Some of the most successful software I've ever seen was fairly ugly stuff that was knocked out in short order by less than 5 people. Years later, as it finally begins to seriously creak at the seams, the corporation puts together a massive team to bring it up to date. They spend massive amounts of time and money on consultants, fad "silver bullet" development tools and fad "silver bullet" project management techniques. 18 months into the 2-year schedule, they realize they've spent a year and a half generation UML Actor diagrams, panic, and immediately set everyone to work coding, without any coherent blueprint at all. The whole thing falls apart, lots of people get laid off, and maybe 2-3 people go in and hack the original warty system to keep it going. With luck, one can repeat this cycle several times.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. We're a 2 person company that's bid on projects against larger competitors. We've had customers call us in after going months or over a year with the larger companies and not having any deliverables.

We've turned around the project in a fraction of the time it took a larger team to even start. It's absolutely insane.

The common reason that we're not taken seriously is that we don't have a big enough team to deliver on time, and if these larger companies can't stay on schedule then we have no hope in hell.

The reason why we can turn things around in time is that we're committed, we know what we're doing, we work together well and we don't milk the customer.

We split the project and run with our tasks, we don't wait for an architect or management to sign off on anything.

I've worked for a large company and hated it. The politics were the biggest problem. Then management had to be educated in what had to be done. Write-ups by the architects had to be explained and clarified back to management because they knew squat. They were the ones that had to communicate to the customer so they had to know what they were talking about. We've suggested that some of the programmers could go and pretend to be the front guys just so the management training sessions would be reduced. That didn't go over well as the managers felt that they were being pinched out of their jobs.

What's worse is that the programmers that headed the projects were related to upper management. They had no clue but were given huge responsibilities, and all of the perks. One of the kids refused to do the job unless he got a Porsche as a starting bonus. Next day there it was in the parking lot. That's when I decided to leave...

Now, the two of us work from home. We have flexible hours, spend time with our kids and get the work done on time or ahead of schedule. We have control over the flow of information needed from the customers and 3rd parties and don't rely on others to forget to contact someone. It may sound inefficient but we're spending less time waiting for others and more time doing the work. We get together when we need to. Most of the time it's online collaboration or telephone.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[vlm]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day.

Look at the spectacular cost of billing systems in the old-world voice telecom... You need 24x7 monitoring NOC and NOC tools and troubleshooting tools for the multiple geographically separate multiple synchronized billing database servers. And, being telecom, you need at least eight layers of management, minimum, each of which needs different reporting systems and dashboards. Finally there's the intermittent / process oriented / batch oriented monitoring tools required. And probably some queuing software, and I'm sure they won't use something cheap or opensource. On the input side you need multiple separate diverse communications links, all monitored by the 24x7 NOC of course using the most expensive tools possible. On the output side you need multiple backup systems and offsite backup, and of course infrastructure to restore old data, for legal and billing disputes. And you need it all security audited to be secure because its chock full of personally identifiable information and needs to be ADA and SOX compliant. Much as public libraries are used as a harassment tool in lawsuits by being forced to provide detailed patron records, you can assume that online newspaper readers will be harassed the same way, so you need to store every click for a long time or accept the costs of being in contempt of court.

You know that at the telco, you're gonna have to sell an unholy heck of a lot of minutes at one penny per minute just to pay for the billing infrastructure that collects those pennies, or you'll have to pay for all that infrastructure upfront as much capex as possible. Or you can save everybody a lot of money and just bill flat rate...

Both in telecom billing, and apparently the "great firewall of NYT" the situation is very much like selling 25 cent cans of soda pop for 50 cents out of a trillion dollar vending machine, it would be less of a loss to just give it away.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm reading slashdot and i have 2 kids... :)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[EraserMouseMan]

This is the truth. Mod parent up. IT Project Managers all need to read Steve McConnell's "Rapid Application Development". It is literally The Holy Bible of IT Proj Mgmt.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[ShadoHawk]

Yeah. And only one is needed after the project is started... ;)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[vlm]

Please do not save me a seat on the space shuttle you build.

If the telecom world built a space shuttle, you'd be billed in one inch increments in detail for the entire launch, it would be almost impossible to find out how much it'll cost other than the short term advertised rate, most of the operating budget would go toward TV commercials and the previously mentioned billing system, and they'd market their launch service as being "unlimited" but if you tried to remain in orbit too long they'd either shoot you down or bill by the inch traveled at exorbitant rates. If you want water, air, and fuel, you'll have to sign up for each separately at a high monthly fee. Randomly stuff would stop working and someone with one day of training in a call center on the other side of the planet, would read a script asking you to reboot your spacecraft, while simultaneously trying to upsell you more services you don't need "Well sir I'm very sorry to hear your space station crashed. While we wait for it to reboot, would you like to hear about our special offer on moon bases?".

But, the good news is, the shuttle would be "free" if you signed a two year contract.

Like the original poster, I also worked in telecom, I know how it is...

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[betterunixthanunix]

And of course there's the classic Mythical Man Month (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month) which, of course, no one reads any more.

Funny, it was required reading in my software engineering course. Then again, perhaps it is not the developers who need to be reading it; more likely, it is management.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's much better to simply start coding. Engineers always know the best way to use the software, and can deliver exactly what's needed by the business, even when they don't understand the business, and they don't understand the users.

In fact, life would be much easier if the Lusers would get out of the way and let us produce masterpieces of UI work like these Android screenshots, amirite?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[OneSmartFellow]

Interesting assertion. I wonder what the Ancient Egyptians building the pyramids would have thought if you had suggested that to them.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[inglorion_on_the_net]

I wonder if people simply don't know the right and wrong ways, or do know, but can't or won't do it the right way.

I think that everyone who has worked on projects of different sizes knows that the more people are in a project, and the more people are in a meeting, the more overhead there is. I would certainly expect managers to know this. Yet it seems that you never have to look far to see projects with overly large meetings, too many layers of management, managers managing teams that would work better without their attentions, or large teams costing money while nobody actually decides what to do. And then, of course, everybody likes to contribute something valuable, so you end up with monstrous requirements for a project where something simple would have brought great value.

I also think that part of the reason this happens so often is that it pays well. Usually, being a manager pays more than being a production worker. And being a manager certainly pays better than saying "Actually, I am not needed here" and giving up the position.

Some people gain great reputations by taking over large, failing companies and turning them around, making them profitable again. I think there is much to gain by learning how they do that and applying the same methods to organizations that suffer from great inefficiency, even if they aren't on the brink of destruction yet.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Canazza]

Didn't Linus Torvalds create that on his own?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[LingNoi]

As an engineer I would LOVE requirements from my user. What I get however is requirements that the manager in charge of the project that hired us wants with little to zero feedback from the people using the product; and because "the customer is always right" it is always my fault when the users complain that the site was designed to spec.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[ubersoldat2k7]

Software is not a final product and that's the problem many managers can't figure out. There should be an initial analysis and an architecture, but if you don't have code, how are the coders supposed to know what they have to do?
Give 6 months at least for each member to know about the business while they do their job: code. Let the application evolve and don't waste your first million on analysis and architecture, because it WILL change, not only because of requirements from the client, but also from other decisions (shall we use PHP or Java?) that can eventually come back and bite you in the ass.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[BeaverCleaver]

I have no citation for this (lmgtfy.com?) but I remember reading in a reputable .au newspaper that the administration of the Melbourne [Australia] tram ticketing network cost almost exactly the same as the ticketing revenue - in other words, they could have just fired all the ticket inspectors, torn out the ticket vending machines, and made the tram network free!

Many large organisations seem to make their priority to simply give their staff work to do. The value of the tasks assigned is less important than simply keeping people busy.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Just Some Guy]

What they're trying to do is allow search engines, Twitter, and other social media to drive traffic to them, but at the same time not allow people to regularly read their content for free.

Here you go:

if request['referer'] in (twitter, facebook) or 'Googlebot' in request['agent']: allow_access()

Since I only spent 3 weeks writing that, I'll just charge $25 million for it. Such a deal!

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

The only thing dumber than your comment is that you think 6 people could build a system to handle nearly 2% of the internet's daily traffic. This is not your mom and pop couple hundred hits a day website, or even your decent company couple thousand hits... NYT averages 268 hits per second. And they have to scale internationally, and they set a bar of 80ms latency. $40M is cheap for a system (including hardware) that can handle those kind of numbers.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[JWSmythe]

    I agree. Well. mostly.

    I've had a few opportunities at jobs, where they had "years of manhours" and a small fortune put into a project that barely worked. They've needed significant changes made, and neither I nor the original coding team could see it modified in the ways the bosses wanted quickly.

    Instead, I've taken the existing project, reproduced the list of requirements, and added the new list of requirements, to give a full scope for a new project. Then I busted ass from mid-day Friday to before working hours on Monday, and rewrote the whole thing. So about 48 man hours (about 16 hours at a time). For some reason the upper level management have been upset when I've turned a project around in such a short time. It's usually preceeded by "it will be impossible to do what took the other team over a year", and then ignorant disbelief when they see it's done to the exactly requested specifications.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[ildon]

My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that if a site treats the google bot differently than a regular user, then google will blacklist them.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[cashman73]

You forgot one thing: the lawyers. The lawyers need to be paid somewhere, for everything from "reviewing" the plans and the policies to dealing with potential lawsuits from people suing you later on (you know that will happen, right?). Maybe this is part of the "consulting fees" at $20 million; they probably also had to reduce the $1 million for the development & testing down to $250,000 and offshore the work to India or Singapore, just so that the lawyers can take some more,. . . Who cares if the code has tons of loopholes in it that allow tons of people to get in the "back door" and access the content for free? Because the lawyers will find out who's doing that and sue them for breach of copyright. That will, of course, up the total price tag for this to $100 million. And the pirates will still find a way around it.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[cashman73]

Three weeks of development and $25 million for one line of code that will be broken with a simple Firefox extension! Priceless! =)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Bengie]

They're probably double counting.

Their logic:
We spent $40mil, as a company, over x months. This project took x months, therefore, the project cost us $40mil.

That's how you get this logic: http://www.venganza.org/piratesarecool4.gif (Safe for Work)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Just Some Guy]

Fixed in commit #3:

if request['referer'] in (twitter, facebook): allow_access() # or 'Googlebot' in request['agent']: allow_access()

That'll be $3.7 million, please.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[cheekyboy]

Coz those idiots didnt use macs or even ever heard of logical shit?

note to developers.

1) be on the inside tech.
2) watch hackers
3) torrent all the good shit.

Any bozo can be a manager, only smart people can be developers.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[fruey]

apparently it is broken anyway, there have been several articles that show just changing the URL got around it on launch, not sure on the status at the current time...

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I love this book! My final dissertation at college was greatly based on Steve McConnel.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

1.0 - yes
2.6.38 - not quite, in fact he's not even in the top 20

Linux is written, mostly, by Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM (each of these companies is at least double as productive as the most productive single developer). It is, in other words, clear proof that individuals can write free software without evil corporations. Oh wait ...

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Mirar]

I'm pretty sure you can make kids with 6 people or less, at least given the right people. Many seem to use only 2 for that kind of project.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[steelfood]

What they lack is vision.

You can pull off a big project with a large group of people. Countless people in the past have shown us you can do it, Steve Jobs being the most visible currently. But you need to have vision. You need to have somebody at the top going, "This is what it needs to look like in the end. This is the part you need to work on. Now go do it."

Most management meetings are more about answering the question that a single, lone visionary would've answered in two minutes, than about actually getting there. Rule by committee isn't only inefficient, it's the perfect way to get nothing done (which is why there are heads of state even in democracies). Management meetings are a form of rule by committee. Is it no wonder then that everything crawls?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Pinhedd]

it's called robots.txt and it's been around for over a decade and a half

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Many large organisations seem to make their priority to simply give their staff work to do. The value of the tasks assigned is less important than simply keeping people busy.

You might have missed this, but as it doesn't strike me as entirely coincidental : you're giving a government department as an example of your theory, not a corporation.

As I said : I don't think that's entirely coincidental.

Public companies + unions => huge masses of mindnumbingly boring jobs where office politics are played out with machetes, which refuse to die

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[hitmark]

So IT projects behave much like Parallel processing? As the number of people involved grows, more time (and energy/money) is spent coordinating them then is spent doing actual work on the project?

Btw, i am reminded of a story about the initial development of the Amiga computer. 1 guy spend 48 dedicated hours to write one of the core libs of the os. His only interaction with management during that time was to ask about a detail related to some interaction with another lib or such.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[ColdWetDog]

Prerequisite: the team must be equipped with powertools to cut through the red tape.

Ladies and Gentleman: May I suggest this little beauty? I'd suggest a pack of 'demolition blades' to go along with it. Qualifies for free shipping! What's not to like?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[hitmark]

PHB never reads anything, they just come up with the big ideas and expect them to be implemented yesterday on a used shoestring budget.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Larry Lightbulb]

Isaac Asimov had an anecdote about being commissioned to write a story in the morning, wrote it at lunch time and gave it to his manger, who told him to wait a couple of weeks because if it was found it didn't take long people would assume it wasn't worth reading. And software can be viewed that way - if there's only six people working on a project then it's not taken seriously enough, you need to make a new department out of the best people from the other departments. And get more consultants.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[hitmark]

I recall hearing a story about some office or other where each day the washroom waste bucket would overflow with paper towels. The people that worked there knew this, the people emptying the bucket and refilling the towel dispenser knew this, but none of them where tasked with making the decision to actually replace the bucket with a larger one.

Add to this the fear of being singled out as either overstepping authority, or the one to blame if something goes wrong, and you get a whole lot of drag as every decision has to climb the ladder and come back down again with a response.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[blueZhift]

It's all such a waste because at the end of the day if they are charging more for paid content than the market wants to pay, they will lose. Even loyal readers are likely to smart at $20/month and will quickly learn to access content through the free options, including the *ahem* gray market. It seems that the entire publishing industry is still intent on propping up the old business model.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[hitmark]

- Blame filthy pirates for the loss: Facepalm

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[hitmark]

I think Charlie Stross mentions coding a online payment system backend so the company could provide a middle man service between British shopping sites and banks in the early 90s. It was done in perl, it was spaghetti code all the way down, was really done as a proof of concept to demo during a tech show of some kind, and was still in use 5 years after he left the company to become a author of scifi.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what I saw going on there:

1) Little to no investment in building and preserving internal technical competency. Even when they had super-smart guys willing to go all out for the company, they didn't invest properly in them. They let go some great team builders who were part of the solution and not the problem, because of stupid internal politics. They also insist on retaining folks whose only skill is annoying technical folks into fixing stuff for them. Technical folks at the Times are like chum in shark-infested water.

2) A consequent heavy reliance on consultants, without effective means of managing dependency on them. When the people who know how to run your systems are largely consultants, and few internal folks are able to take over should the relationship go sideways, management is terrified of pissing the consultants off. Which of course leads to too much trust, and inevitable abuse. The Times has been taken for so many rides by consultants ... if they had invested a fraction of that on internal technical talent instead of insisting on treating technology workers as interchangeable cogs -- while worshipping the editorial teams -- they might have avoided quite a few clusterfrags. Technology workers are not your janitors, they're soldiers in a war you're losing.

If they want to survive in a world that runs on technology, they need to appreciate just how reliant on technical talent they truly are. Maybe they could manage this reliance using a few really great consultancies, but since consultants are rarely engaged long-term, I believe they should build and continually invest in internal technology teams. And never let talented technology workers think you've forgotten how valuable they are. They already know, but wonder if you do.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Hatta]

Sure, they spent millions of dollars trying to find a way to have their cake and eat it too. Turns out you can't.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, does this ever sound familiar.

My previous employer had a product that was 20+ years old, enhanced incrementally over that time. Under the hood, it was a mess of spaghetti code but at least it was stable and it worked. Higher-ups wanted a "sexy," GUI-based replacement. Over 10 years and tens of millions of dollars were spent building the successor product--and it didn't work. It was a top-heavy monstrosity that had no clear design vision. It could do damn near everything, unfortunately it didn't do anything particularly well. Due to certain design decisions, if a customer had a large database, upgrades could take days to run as data conversions were performed, and the customer would be down that whole time.

It became such a clusterfuck it nearly bankrupted the company. Upper management was eviscerated by the investors, a third of the company was laid off, and where did they go from there? Why, right back to the almost-30-year-old product that started it all, adding GUI and Web functionality, which took only a few months rather than years. They also had a very small team build a standalone product and had it out the door within 6 months.

There were many people (myself included) screaming about what a bloated piece of crap this new product was, that it was basically unsalvageable, but Management Knew Best, and it almost destroyed the company.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[M. Baranczak]

kids are usuallly something which gets done by teams of 2 people.

Imagine how much faster it would be with a team of 6.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[TheRaven64]

The common reason that we're not taken seriously is that we don't have a big enough team to deliver on time, and if these larger companies can't stay on schedule then we have no hope in hell.

Next time you have a project, you can hire me as a consultant. You won't have to manage me, and I won't do any work, and will only require a token salary, but I'll increase the size of your team by 50% and therefore make you seem 50% more credible!

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[TheRaven64]

I have no citation for this (lmgtfy.com?) but I remember reading in a reputable .au newspaper that the administration of the Melbourne [Australia] tram ticketing network cost almost exactly the same as the ticketing revenue - in other words, they could have just fired all the ticket inspectors, torn out the ticket vending machines, and made the tram network free!

I'm pretty sure this story was on Slashdot. Something similar has been discovered by a lot of places. In a lot of European cities, you buy the tickets on the station and swipe them in the tram. No one ever checks them, and you don't have to go through a ticket barrier anywhere. It turns out, most people are honest and don't try to cheat the system, and catching the few that do would cost more than the extra revenue from 100% enforcement (as well as inconveniencing the legitimate customers) - possibly a file sharing analogy is needed here.

I found it very interesting the way bus fares worked when I was in Japan. When you got on, you pulled a ticket from a machine, which identified the stop. At the front of the bus, there was a big display showing the cost of getting off at each stop for each embarkation stop. When you got off, you dropped the ticket and the fare into a bucket.

When people didn't have the correct change, they'd drop slightly more or slightly less into the bucket and make it up later. It turned out that, on average, people paid slightly more than the advertised fare. It also meant that the bus could stop for very short periods of time, because no one needed to buy a ticket when they got on or off.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I can actually see how this happens. Large organizations spending millions and taking years to do something a small team could whip up (and probably do a better job of) in a few months.

How come nobody says this when there's a private vs. government debate raging? Government agencies are not really any different than large businesses. There are certain inefficiencies with being large and that's a product of human nature, not government per se.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Princeofcups]

I'm a consultant in telecom. I see this every day. I'm convinced that any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

That's true. But the problem is that for every team of 6 dedicated engineers, there's a team of 6 incompetent dick-wads that will goof off and get nothing done, or else stretch out the process as long as possible and spend as much money as possible to skim off as much money as they can. Management doesn't trust engineers because usually they are not as technical (I hate to say smart), and really do not understand the issues. And of course the engineers do not trust the managers, since they are just getting in the way of getting work done. So guess who are the ones that are most likely to play nice with management? The exact dick-wads that they were trying to keep out. It is a rare thing where management knows that they can trust their engineers to not only get the work done, but get the right work done, and let then free to work as they see fit.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[greed]

With a large enough team, you can complete one child every week.

But it still takes about 9 months for each child.

This is why we have pipelining superscalar processors. You'll probably want out-of-order completion, too, sometimes kids are done early.

The easier example is: One man can dig a hole in 60 seconds. 60 men cannot dig one hole in 60 seconds. But 60 men can dig 60 holes in 60 seconds. That's SIMD, actually: one "dig hole" instruction, 60 execution units running it.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

One simply needs 6 very large people.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Minwee]

Video evidence found on the Internet seems to suggest otherwise.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[DavidTC]

Um, do you know how much traffic this web site gets? Do you know how many people it took to make it?

You don't 'develop' tools to run websites. About the only company that's needed to do that is Facebook, which the most popular site on the internet, and entirely dynamic. And Google has developed some stuff. But everyone else just uses existing software to run their website on. MySQL and PHP, MSSQL and ASP, Oracle and JSP, open source or commercial, whatever, but they aren't writing that software.

The NYTs doesn't even need a dynamic site with custom tools, they can just regenerate the thing every few minutes. Or, hell, it's not that complicated a site, they can just generate it in real time, although caching would be nice. (They're running Sun-ONE-Web-Server, so I have no idea what scripting they're using, that can run anything.) They just need to pay for enough servers to run the thing, and yes, six people is more than enough for managing the servers.

But $40 million isn't the cost of running the website.(1) It's the cost of the damn development of the paywall. Not even the subscription system, that already existed.

The paywall is a damn cookie that just counts how many time people visit, with some referer exceptions, an exception for logged in people, and tricks to make it hard to delete. That's it. That's all that is. It's something that any idiot could cobble together in a few hours, and a single person could write a pretty good one in a week. (And, as has been pointed out, theirs is only 'pretty good' and has plenty of issues.) It cost them $40 million dollars. It should have cost at most $100,000.

1) Although that would be even more insane.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[greed]

I wrote something similar as a summer student at a Canadian telecom research company. Well, it wasn't spaghetti, but it was my first-ever OO program, and my first-ever C++ program, back when the reference on the language was just the Annotated Reference Manual and GCC still had that "new compiler" smell.

It was a stop-gap kludge project, with a UI modelled on the HP-48SX calculator. It was supposed to last up to a year while the real project got going.

You know where this is going. The real project was canned and they just kept using the kludge. Which meant I had to do phone support for it the next summer. Arrrgh.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[MaskedSlacker]

Pretty sure he meant 6 or fewer. You can make a kid with six people, it's just overkill. You certainly don't need more than six.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[MaskedSlacker]

The FBI is going to subpoena /. for your IP so they can find those kids and return them to their families.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[betona]

I'm just curious: Can six people install enterprise SAP?

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

beat me to the punch ;-)

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anrego]

Scarily I've actually seen efficiency in both types of large organization.

The key is kind of what I've mentioned in my original post. You need to have a process in place for "small stuff" and the ability to get it going without too much overhead. Private companies seem better at this because they are tighter with their money, and anything that sounds like it will cost less generally finds some success if the right people are pitching the idea. Government is historically (and somewhat necessarily) riddled with process, but I think this "small, agile (required buzzword) teams to handle smaller projects" mentality is making headway due to a somewhat proven record of being cheaper.

You still need the big team(s) for the big stuff... but I think there is going to be a trend towards having additional smaller teams less burdened with process to deal with smaller tasks.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[DavidTC]

I should point out that the NYT Paywall is apparently a much more complex beast than a simple "pay up to see the articles". What they're trying to do is allow search engines, Twitter, and other social media to drive traffic to them, but at the same time not allow people to regularly read their content for free.

Well, yeah, which would require...a cookie. Each person gets a cookie. You can increment it or not increment it based on referer.

If you don't have a cookie, Javascript that redirs you to a page telling you to enable your cookies. (Google, incidentally, explicitly allows this behavior.)

And you make it where a lot of the links don't work without Javascript, to stop people from just disabling Javascript totally. Or even make the page slide into view using Javascript. But you have a sitemap and enough normal links works that Google is okay at finding each article, and you make sure that each page Google indexes really does have that content on it (So as not to annoy them.), even if other people need a cookie to see it.

It's really not rocket science, a single person working eight hours could write one basically as functional as theirs is. Yes, people could get around it if they tried, but, um, they can do that here too.

My guess as to the approximate cost breakdown:

That breakdown is totally insane. The idea that they paid the actual people who did the work a million dollars? Ludicrous. Maybe $100,000.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[__aancvu2993]

> I wonder if people simply don't know the right and wrong ways, or do know, but can't or won't do it the right way.

I'll begin by stating this:

A people hire A people
B people hire C people

When I was fresh out of college I thought things were run very differently that they are in 99.999% of places. Thus, working for the government does not mean that you want to serve your country, your culture or your society and it sure does not turn you into Abraham Lincoln, just like installing Debian does not turn you into Don Knuth.

Except for the absolutely most excellent companies in the world, of which there may be 30, everywhere else is filled with a bunch of career-anxious monkeys trapped in the results of choices they didn't understand and lifes they don't want; in the office they spend most of their energy staying put and trying to read the mind of the bigwigs, which in turn are also sucked in into a life they despise, also trying to stay put and read the mind of the bigwigs, which...

Results are secondary; what matters when someone has ditched their dreams for whatever reason is an endless, empty chase.

Thus, a good job does not earn you any points in most places, hence people turn to other games.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[StikyPad]

any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people.

Well, I can think of one or two -- winning the Superbowl, riding a motorcycle, Hands Across America -- that sort of thing.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[dkleinsc]

That breakdown is totally insane. The idea that they paid the actual people who did the work a million dollars? Ludicrous. Maybe $100,000.

I said the 10 people that did the work collectively cost $1 million. That's about $85K per person for salary and benefits + $15K for office space, hardware, etc.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[badran]

Now imagine if 5 are males.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and just adding to that, but also expounding like the costs involved, first you need a task force, and you charge this task force with setting up several competing but also coordinating committees, dedicated to small portions of the job at hand, (and the committees are charged with determining what exactly needs to be done, how it will be financed, and finally the committees set up working groups to actually recruit, hire, and inspect the quality of the work (all subcontracted out of course). So there you go. Of course there have to be managerial layers interspersed within each of these layers, and cost control people, budget people, content control people, etc, etc, etc. Or you could whip one up at home yourself inside of a week.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Rich0]

Certainly true where I work. Typically senior management takes the first six months of the year to figure out our strategic plans for the year (during which time half of the general staff idles), then projects launch and start out in panic mode to meet EOY deadlines. Of course, EOY means in time for year-end ratings which is something like Oct-Nov, and everybody is gone in Dec. So, we spend about 5 months of the year doing productive work, and senior management spends the whole year locked in a conference room.

Oh, and you can't change a light bulb without a business case, near-VP approval, a project plan, and 10 people each doing exactly one part of the project while trying as hard as possible not to collaborate. That is, unless you're one of those groups that just breaks all the rules, in which case you could probably just run a whole CRM system out of a 850MB access database on a network share.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

With enough time and beer the pyramids could be built one person at a time.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Rich0]

Yup - at work we have documented processes, and nobody ever wants to point out a problem with them, because to fix one line in a process requires going through a horrible process as you re-negotiate the other 499 lines in the process with all the people who fought about them the first time they got approved, but without the help of whatever VP rammed the process through the first time.

As a result we either ignore our documented processes, or just follow non-optimal ones. Fixing them is just not worth the effort.

And of course, the guy who speaks up gets the action item...

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[AK Marc]

The issue is that there aren't proper project managers running it who are evaluated on their performance when assigning new projects. When general managers run projects, they will never succeed. From what I've seen in corporate world, the best politicking and least competent manager gets all the cool projects, does them poorly, and blames the competent people for his failures. Then when the next project comes along, he volunteers, does it poorly, and uses the fact he did it to include the support under his sphere of influence. In a stroke of irony, there are more politics in the private sector than government.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[AK Marc]

How it's built is irrelevant to how it's built. I know you are going for funny, but working in telecom, there's a lot of friction between the engineers and the sales. The engineers think sales ruins everything they build. They feel just as raped as the customers. And the sales/marketing team hates the engineers for requiring that things be "done right" which means nothing to them other than jacking up the cost for irrelevant things like "uptime" and such.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Skuld-Chan]

You just described what it is like working at Adobe...

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Shotgun]

I'm actually involved in proving this right now.

I, along with two others, automated a complex system test to the point where you submitted an image, and came back later to collect your results. We built a web interface that allowed you to track the tests, and all sort of ancillary links to useful information. We did it all in less than 6 months while keeping up with an aggressive testing schedule to meet a tight release deadline.

A second-line manager, who was over our team before we all complained about him to the point that upper-management conducted a reorg, obviously wants credit for it. He has put together a "team", with the stated goal of building EXACTLY what we have. WE'RE EVEN ON THE TEAM!! We've been having weekly meetings for 10 months now. We've convinced exactly ONE of the engineers from another team to configure a testbed like our, and start using our scripts.

Meanwhile, we just keep chugging along, improving our process in parallel. Management can take a simple task, and choke the life out of it with "process". The major driver is that they are in charge, have no clue what they're doing, but they have to make it LOOK like they did something spectacular. That means multi-colored charts and graphs, not constant, efficient testing that improves developer productivity and a stable release. You've GOT to have an attractive, mult-color dashboard...quality be damned.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[DavidTC]

Well, you're assuming it took a year, and that people actually got paid reasonable amounts.

I was assuming closer to two months, and also that people were being paid jack shit.

It's not really important.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Shotgun]

Careful.

What you've basically done is prove that they are clueless dumbasses. Not that the point wasn't evident before. But now you have firm evidence of the situation that they can't dance around. The best thing you can do in that situation is to find a way to the give the most honest among them credit for it, and then let him drag you to the point of prominence you deserve.

Your goal is not the same as your managers. You want to make a better product that increases the companies value. They want to build an empire to MANAGE.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

i can spoof my user agent any time, you need to really think harder about your 25 mio dollar solution

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[thegarbz]

How about charges in changing contracts? The way I see it is during the rollout the terms at which you could access the site before having to pay changed several times. One thing about most engineering contracts is the specs are set in stone, you want a variance? Excellent please sign here and open your wallet. What the variance actually reduces the cost of the project? Sorry but we did ... erm... engineering work already so it's going to cost you regardless.

Best case of this I have seen is the design and construction of a large industrial plant unit. During the design phase someone noted that a pipe obstructed a walkway, problem is the 3D model had already been signed off so that's where the pipe was going to end up. The contracting company actually wanted soo much money simply to move the pipe in the air with a U bend, that the company left it, started up, commissioned, signed it off, payed the contractor, shut it down, flushed it, and got another company to cut the pipe out and move it afterwards.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"... any project, no matter how big can be done by 6 people."

I concur. However, there are notable exceptions. NASA accomplishes some truly amazing things using large teams. Yet surprisingly, the only redundancy among those teams seems to be that which is barely sufficient to insure that people get enough sleep. A possible indicator as to what's going on there is that NASA's engineering to marketing ratio is about a bazillion to one.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! You just violated the Google spider policies and got the entire site blacklisted from Google.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Just Some Guy]

Why? NYT didn't.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with a lot of large organizations is that rarely does anybody actually "own" anything enough to make real decisions. Everything needs to get "socialized" to get "buy in" from everybody.

Or if there are actually people empowered to make decisions, they won't make tough ones out of fear, so they bring in the outside "expert" consultants to make proposals. That way, if the decision goes poorly they can say "I brought in the experts" as an excuse. But that takes a lot of time and money.

Not to mention that most managers think - and especially at a "non-technology" company like a newspaper - that software people are just interchangeable cogs who should take orders and execute on their grand plan. So a lot of the time they don't engage technology to help with crafting the solutions. Then it falls off the rails once the engineers start pointing out flaws in the plan, which then stalls everything out while another round of decisions has to get run through the gauntlet (thus a bunch of engineers sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for direction).

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Teancum]

Software architecture documents are something that I personally find very useful when coding. Still, those who start to follow that document slavishly usually get themselves into a world of trouble and it does bite them hard when you start getting into the development cycle.

The largest problem with software development is that the development team rarely knows the full problem domain until after the application has been finished, and even then it can be debated.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[AK Marc]

I've said this multiple times here and other places. The private sector is no more efficient than the government. The government is no more efficient than the private sector. Both are inherently flawed, and both share a large overlap in bureaucracy being inherently inefficient. It's the size that kills it. Well, that and the US puritanical core (not just a morals issue, but the feeling that we in the US have a responsibility to force our morals on others, even if we know it will directly harm them) which results in the nutjobs wanting local jobs (I've never seen a school board that wasn't at least half insane people because they were the only ones willing to dedicate their lives to telling everyone else how they should raise their children).

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The NYT already had all of that they just needed to add a method of billing.

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[coolmadsi]

You end up with layers and layers of process controlling huge unwieldy teams.

I originally read that as "You end up with lawyers and lawyers"

Re:Large organization doing something simple

[tmarthal]

The A people hire A people, B people hire C people originally came from Steve Jobs, right? The rest of your post is very depressing, and very true.

No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

The NYT's entire outlook towards life is economically incorrect. Yes, I am a fiscal conservative and this just demonstrates to me they have no handle on the economy. Krugman is out of touch with reality.

Re:No surprise

[GameboyRMH]

Yes, I am a fiscal conservative and this just demonstrates to me they have no handle on the economy.

And yet what happens every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US doesn't demonstrate anything to you?

Re:No surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize that stupidity is a prerequisite for being a fiscal conservative, but blaming Krguman for the NYT paywall being overpriced has to be the dumbest statement of all time.

Re:No surprise

[peragrin]

shh don't tell him that. Don't tell him that every time there is a republican in the white house the economy crashes. one of the few exceptions was the dot bomb of the clinton era.

The problem with republicans is they cut taxes first and then try to cut spending to match but quite get there.

First thing you do is raise taxes to cover your existing problems
Second you do is to cut spending to better levels
Third is to use the difference between steps 1 and 2 to pay off the debt
Fourth is to cut taxes to #2 levels.

4 simple steps that will take roughly 15 years to fully implement. of course we will have 3-4 presidential elections by that point and each one will gut at least part of the process. Just like Bush gutted Clinton's tax setting to make us have a balanced budget by now. How did Bush do that by giving tax breaks before the debt was dealt with, and doubling the national debt in the process.

Re:No surprise

[Attila Dimedici]

What, you mean the fact that when a fiscal conservative is in charge, the U.S. economy does much better than when a fiscal liberal is in charge?

Re:No surprise

[GameboyRMH]

If by "better" you mean "debt-tastic."

But it might seem better at the time, in the same way that going on a crazy party bender while charging to your credit card would.

Re:No surprise

[iserlohn]

4/10, the Krugman part gave it away really..

Re:No surprise

[Dragonslicer]

And yet what happens every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US doesn't demonstrate anything to you?

To be fair, though, when was the last time a fiscal conservative was in charge of the US?

Re:No surprise

[Attila Dimedici]

When George W. Bush was President the Democrats who ran Congress since January of 2007 increased the Federal deficit by unprecendented amounts. When Obama became President, they made the Federal deficits under George W. Bush look like chump change. So, under which President was Federal spending more like going on a crazy party bender?

Re:No surprise

[DarkOx]

Conservatives in the White House don't actually correlate with economic ruin at all. In fact some of our greatest economic booms have happened when we had presidents like Ike in office. Regan had arguably good reasons for the policy he pushed at the time, economic warfare with the soviets was preferable to a shooting war though costly probably did not cost much more than a shooting conflict would have. The economic disaster under Nixon was pretty much a direct result of war spending that LBJ got us into, and Nixon just lacked the good sense to get us out of soon enough.

Bush Sr. put us on a trajectory to realize the surpluses we saw under Clinton, Bush raised taxes if you recall even though during the election he said he would not. Clinton and his friends who sadly are still on the Senate Banking committee created the regulatory environment that let Fanny and Freddie get out of control, and pushed people like Greenspan to keep rates so low so long at their funny money printing organization the FED that Banks took stupid stupid risks. Under Bush Jr. There was not much growth but there was no contraction either until the crisis, which I don't think he can really be held to account on.

Re:No surprise

[GameboyRMH]

I thought you might bring this up, but then I thought "Naw, he probably notices the unusual circumstances of a massive financial crash on top of near-trillion-dollar unnecessary war costs, on top of the fact that Obama isn't much of a fiscal liberal - and there have been fiscally liberal Republican presidents too, so party affiliation doesn't necessarily indicate fiscal policy."

But I overestimated you.

Re:No surprise

[peragrin]

I only agree about Bush Sr. He was a good guy.

Reagan did kill the soviets through his spending but the stock market crash of 1987 was the result of that spending.

If you look at what happened form 2001-2008 you will realize one fact, the only thing keeping the country going was new home construction and loans, and once that stopped it all stopped.

We never really recovered with a diversified economy from the dot bomb, but it was hidden behind huge home sales and tax breaks.

My personal income tax has yet to recover from that mess. Every year I have to pay more than the previous year though my salary only rarely goes up.

Re:No surprise

[Cornwallis]

Yes, I am a fiscal conservative and this just demonstrates to me they have no handle on the economy.

And yet what happens every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US doesn't demonstrate anything to you?

Which tells you they really aren't fiscal conservatives.

Re:No surprise

[GameboyRMH]

And they aren't true Scotsmen either I suppose?

You're going to have to come up with a new word for the "true" fiscal conservatives and point out what makes them true conservatives vs. all those that have been elected so far.

Re:No surprise

[bendodge]

In my irrelevant opinion, a true fiscal conservative is someone with a steel backbone who will veto spending projects (that's a cool term I made up) until they die, regardless of the political consequences. Such a person must be a principle fanatic who realizes that he probably won't be re-elected, because the financial systems move slowly enough that his term will be over before the gains are realized. He must also be heartless enough to ditch the special concerns of everyone who helped him get to the top, simply telling them, "Sorry, I'm doing what's Constitutional and best for the country."

In short, he's either a myth or something resembling Ron Paul. Regan a good start, but a) his priority was dealing with the Soviets, and b) he had too many political connections and favors to pay.

Re:No surprise

[radtea]

He said:

every single time a fiscal conservative is in charge of the US

You replied:

every time there is a republican in the white house the economy crashes

He is talking about fiscal conservatives. You are talking about Republicans. Republicans threw their fiscal conservatives over the side in the early 1980's, 30 years ago. Seriously, go and read the history of Reagan's first term, and David Stockman's critique of it: "he specifically criticized the failure of congressional Republicans to support a reduction in government spending as necessary offsets to the large tax cuts, in order to avoid the creation of large deficits and an exploding national debt."

A generation later people are still thinking of Republicans as the party of fiscal conservatism, and it is beyond me why this is so. You would have to be either not paying attention or completely delusional to think that Republicans are the least bit interested in balanced budgets, smaller government, or fiscal responsibility.

Re:No surprise

[radtea]

You're going to have to come up with a new word for the "true" fiscal conservatives and point out what makes them true conservatives vs. all those that have been elected so far.

Operationally, true fiscal conservatives balance government budgets, the way Bill Clinton did. People can give all kinds of reasons why that "doesn't count" in an attempt to preserve their ideological blinders, but that is the reality.

No Republican president in my lifetime (I'm in my late 40's) has been a true fiscal conservative by this measure.

SAYING "I believe in smaller government and balanced budgets" and then growing the government and increasing spending and debt makes you a spendthrift and a hypocrite, not a conservative.

Re:No surprise

[DavidTC]

As has been pointed out, conservatives and communists have a lot in common.

They're all sure that their ideology could success if we'd just find a real one to elect to office and do it right this time. Those last half a dozen times they picked someone who wasn't a real true conservative or a real true communist? That didn't count, they were liars!

Fuck off, both of you groups. We elect people in this world. I don't care if your ideology works in some imaginary perfect world with an imaginary perfect leader. It's obvious in this world that neither of you can tell a 'real true' anything from a random guy walking down the street, and thus we are forced to assume the next guy, who's saying all the right words now, will do exactly the same thing when put in charge.

Hilariously, I used to say that. and then the current crop of Republicans got elected. And, hey, they are actually fiscally conservative.

Thank God. At least now American will finally notice how actually destructive and insane the policies of fiscal conservatives are.

It's sorta like late 80s USSR...well, they've finally ramped off on the totalitarianism. Communism had 'the right people' in charge for once, or as close as it had ever gotten...and they said, um, since we stopped shooting the people who complain, everyone seems to have started complaining. Maybe we should just stop doing the whole 'communism' thing and see if we can have a working economy for once.

Next election, it will be 'Well, we tried fiscal conservativism, this actually for real, with real actual conservatives. And, strangely, it didn't seem to fix the recession, and now no one has unemployment insurance or WIC. Hrm, perhaps we should elect people actually attempting to solve our problem.'.

Re:No surprise

[AK Marc]

I vote for Hoover, and he ended up with the term "hooverville" being created in his honor. Perhaps this "fiscally conservative" idea isn't so good in a modern world...

Its easy

[MichaelSmith]

A lot of it will have gone into executive information components of the system. Ways of showing the guys in charge exactly how much money they are making from the paywall this minute. Then you have the configuration interfaces and the teams to design datasets to control how the paywall works. Then you have the engineering which actually implements the paywall. They probably wrote a proxy from scratch to do that. Then they put it through validation. This created 10000 bug reports. Thats a lot of bugs so they outsourced the bug fixing to four companies in India who approached the solutions in 223 different ways. Then the resulting code changes were merged back into the mainline with bugs closed. Nobody wanted to do the tests again which was probably a good idea for the sanity of the people involved. Then they went live.

Well, thats my guess, anyway.

Re:Its easy

[gl4ss]

you actually forgot one bit.

hiring 'shadow developers' (also known as retards) and inflating the team size from the 10 needed to the unnecessary 100+ with testers. the times still receives just the output from 5 good guys but gets a bill for 100+. and every new person introduced to the team is more profit, as the there's more hours and persons to bill for(so they hire an unnecessary new guy/gal to inflate the team, the new person costs say 5000$ a month, the client is billed for 6000$, the company ruining executives keeping the difference . and universities have been just inventing new professions so it's pretty easy to inflate the team with sheep experts, marketing advisors, accessibility destroyers etc. and every single one of them will try to come up with output that would change the end product somehow, to justify their job).

Re:Its easy

[HangingChad]

> the new person costs say 5000$ a month, the client is billed for 6000$

ROFL! Where do you work? If the new person costs $5000/month then they most likely get billed at $275/hour.

Re:Its easy

[gl4ss]

I'm in Finland, nobodys got money to pay 275/hour now, even if it got results. maybe in 1999, but not now, so the name of the game has been what I just said, I wasn't trying to be funny :.

the point of this small bleeding - which is scaled up, so it's small only per person - is just that, it's easier to justify new help than paying the old guys what they should be paid. it unfortunately makes things happen a lot slower, not faster. also it dilutes responsibility so you can't even point out anyone doing anything wrong.. everything goes by the book but the results are a disaster.

Re:Its easy

[SquirrelDeth]

Yet with your own business it is very hard to make $50/hr for the same job done by a large company (50 - 75 employees) billing $200 -$250. In my experience I'm usually lucky when I pull in $25 - $35 /hr but such is the price to be at home with the kids every night so no really complaints other than why should one guy and myself do a job for 25% of the cost compared to the large company that needs 7 employees to do the same job with lower quality. And for a real kick in the teeth I was offered a job by one of the managers of this large company to manage a team of 8 people for $15.75 for out of town work with an unpaid 3-4 hr of driving daily (from not to the office) as they were not going to pay for hotels. I almost had a heart attack, shit my pants, and punched him in the face, that is a third of what the job is worth as a payroll employee. But somehow the cute blond 20 year old receptionist can afford to drive a fancy Escalade with $4000 rims and every piece of chrome imaginable.

Re:Its easy

[Anonymous Coward]

how can I get a job as one of the 90+ guys who doesn't do any work, that's what I want to know

Re:Its easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Th standard "labor burden" is 200%, that the "burdened" rate charged the client is 3x the rate paid to worker. $5000/month is ~$42 /hour, which would normally be a burdened rate of "only" ~$125/hr, not $275. (Still, this tells you what business you ought to be in, and it ain't doing anything productive...)

Re:Its easy

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience professional consulting rates in Finland begin at 80 euros per hour (12000 per month) at a small cut-throat business, 120 and upwards (18000 per month) for a larger consultancy, and of course experienced people are more expensive.

Re:Its easy

[rayzat]

Let's make sure were talking the same thing. In terms of programmer take home pay gl4ss is probably spot on, it's about what I could pay when I owned my own small shop. What I charged the company was 2-3 times more depending on the work, so in the $75 to $105/hr range. Hanging Chad is spot on for what bigger shops charge a company, starting at $185 going up to $400 for the most senior people. Granted none of this is take home to the end programmers, the big shops don't give their people much more then I did, even though they charged significantly more. Overall the 40-50M, as big as it seems, seems about right for a multi-year project outsource to one of the big consulting companies. I think it's way to much but that's what these companies charge. I've seen one company charge almost 100k/per month for some of their "specialists" for fixed scope work. I'm sure the likes of Nokia and other large companies in Finland pay rates like this.

Re:Its easy

[sjames]

That accounts for the first million, the other 39 million were spent in tracking performance, grilling developers (who have work to do) so they can do micro updates to the gantt chart in 15 minute intervals, the three layers of management to make sure someone gets yelled at if any of the bureaucracy gets bypassed (ESPECIALLY if it results in an embarrassingly large jump in productivity). Then there's the executive costs including 6 martini lunches and greens fees.

The actual work could have been accomplished with 6 people in about the same timeframe for under a million, but then how would all those stuffed suits justify their existence?

Of course, if they got rid of all the layers of management and raised the pay and benefits of the actual productive staff to more motivational levels, they probably wouldn't have needed the paywall to remain afloat in the first place.

CAL's

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft client access licences for all subscrbers?
Paywall is implemented in sharepoint

What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Anne_Nonymous]

Consulting.

What else offers so little for so much?

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that it all wound up in India.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[joe_garage]

This is a trend -consulting fees, otherwise how did the CND gov spend 1.5billion$ on the federal gun registry to register maybe 7 million guns (that really no one wanted anyway) .....

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Blymie]

The sad part is that there *are* good consultants out there. I'm one of them. I'm extremely skilled, knowledgeable, and I bring a lot to the table.

Frankly, there are a *lot* of firms out there that have unskilled admins, that only need help during certain projects, or during time of distress. As well, as long as the person doing the audit is acceptable, external security audits are a GOOD thing. If one truly cares about security (and not ego), external audits are great. Lastly, there are firms that are too small to really staff a full time admin, and can use a consultant for 5 hours per day, or per week, or for some -- 5 hours per month!

However, I know precisely what you are talking about, when you complain about consultants. I've seen so many incompetent consultants, and I've seen even more greedy ones. As an example, I've seen consultant firms offer *less*, and charge literally 4 times the price that I do. Said firm had a consultant who was touted as an 'expert', yet was a roofer 6 months earlier, and hadn't even used a command line before then.

The worst of the worst, from what I've seen, are web design firms. I can't even imagine how they get off charging $50k, for drupal/joomla installs, with about 10 hours of graphic design, and about 10 hours of followup work. It is utterly bizarre!

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[SharpFang]

The sad part is that there *are* good consultants out there. I'm one of them. I'm extremely skilled, knowledgeable, and I bring a lot to the table.

...but that's what they all say.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[SquirrelDeth]

A consulting fee is simply a legal way to give your buddy lots of money for not doing any work. Worse consultants have no real responsibility or liability of any kind.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[DarthVain]

Serves them right I say. If executives do not want to hire the right people and have internal staff, and want to vendor everything out to get raped by consultants it serves them right. Maybe eventually they will learn that this is a very stupid business model, at least to the extreme that it is taken. The best part is now if they need additional work, or if something breaks, guess what, more consultants. Not to mention in 10 years no one will have the documentation or know how anything works, and the actual folks that worked on it as consultants will be long gone. Likely the executives got bonuses for having so few employees. This is pretty much standard operating procedure in government, I see and hear about it all the time.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Blymie]

The sad part is that there *are* good consultants out there. I'm one of them. I'm extremely skilled, knowledgeable, and I bring a lot to the table.

...but that's what they all say.

Perhaps, but now you're slinging mud.

The truth is, as with any profession, there are a lot of incompetent people out there. Frankly, I've seen a lot of incompetence in the IT world, including full time employees.

I find it astounding that some consultants charge for lunch, and even charge for taking a crap. If I stop and have a 10 minute discussion, non-work related, with someone at a firm I'm working for... I *take that time off the bill*. I don't charge for research, unless the topic is utterly obscure. You're paying for expertise, so why would you pay for research time?!

I bill at $90 per hour, whereas my full time peers generally earn about 1/2 that. Considering I'm not (here, in Canada) covered by employment insurance, that I don't bill for lunch, breaks and other things employees do, it's actually quite the favourable deal.

What do I get out of it, then? The option to work where I choose, when I choose, and with variety you do not normally get from a full time job. One day I'll be working with EDA software, the next with Geometrics. It prevents me from getting into a groove. Most good admins I know, constantly fine-tune systems, script for many issues, and as a result the job becomes easier to maintain. That gets a bit boring, however. I prefer to constantly be challenged.

Ah well, to each their own.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[DarthVain]

or worse in Ontario spending 1 billion on a medical computer system, and not getting anything. At least the gun registry exists (though people can argue about its effectiveness). The Ministry of Health broke all the vendor rules, awarding overpriced contracts to consultant friends, I wouldn't be surprised if their were kickbacks etc... In the end, they fired the woman in charge, but then gave her a huge settlement on her severance... Nothing really happened to the Minister that was supposed to be at the helm.

If the public REALLY wants to curtail government waste, I bet you could realistically save la huge amount simply by building talent internally again, rather than not hiring or allowing work to be done by actual employees for the sake of "smaller government", while at the same time using consultant vendors that cost like 500% more. It really is crazy when you think rationally about it.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[AJH16]

Business people don't understand what is available in technology which is why they are paying for it to be someone else's profit, err problem. Sad but true, same reason people buy Bose speakers and Apple products.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Anonymous Coward]

as a consultant who's finishing up a 2000+ hour Drupal site, I can say this: fuck you.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Kjella]

I find it astounding that some consultants charge for lunch, and even charge for taking a crap. If I stop and have a 10 minute discussion, non-work related, with someone at a firm I'm working for... I *take that time off the bill*. I don't charge for research, unless the topic is utterly obscure. You're paying for expertise, so why would you pay for research time?!

I guess it depends on the work, but I never metered my time with a stopwatch nor was I this all knowing oracle. I'm a specialist in a narrow field that they like to hire in for a limited time, If you hire me for two weeks I'll be pretty much like a highly skilled employee in that time. No more, no less - you saw my CV when you hired me and if you ask me about things too obscure for me to know, I'm still the person on the team most likely to work it out. Plus the border between when I'm solving a general problem and when I'm doing specific work for you is quite fluid, as long as I'm working on the specifics of your problem I feel that is very billable. I never billed for lunch though, but reality is that most people just look at the cost per normal day and the 7,5 hour rate is higher so if we have to work overtime it is better for us.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Beat The Odds]

What else offers so little for so much?

Government?

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only people who know are those that work there. Ha, you just don't know how right you are. And it wasn't 40-50 million Bloomberg is wrong. Guess how I know that...

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Rich0]

Yeah, but they make such nice powerpoint presentations. Everybody who hires consultants gets big bonuses, because their slides look better than those generated by their peers...

As long as executive leadership is swayed by pretty pictures, and senior managers are forbidden from hiring graphics artists, they will instead hire consultants to do the work of graphics artists at 10X the cost.

Re:What did they spend the $40-50 million on?

[Blymie]

I don't recall saying YOUR project equated to 10 hours of graphic design, and 10 hours of other work, did I?

I've seen company sites in Drupal and Joomla, that literally took that long, where hosting was extra, where even fixing BUGS was extra, and the bill was $50k+.

If you're not one of those people, good for you! However, why would you respond?!

Answers

[VincenzoRomano]

1. Stupidity
2. Ignorance
3. Stupidity + Ignorance
Fomr the highest company levels (C*O) down to the managers.

Re:Answers

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the last two very important steps.

Re:Answers

[JonySuede]

?
profit ?

Re:Answers

[VincenzoRomano]

Backhander? Insider business?

Windows licenses? ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

In regard to the above poster who asks "what else offers so little for so much", clearly this would...

A simpler way.

[khasim]

Follow the money.

Someone is getting paid. Find out who and what that person's connection to the person signing off on that expense is.

Re:A simpler way.

[GameboyRMH]

If this was government work you'd know without a shadow of a doubt that they're laundering political kickbacks through IT projects, as usual...and some underpaid fresh-out-of-school coder(s) would be left to do the real work for peanuts while the person who was paid so much to do the work would take an extended vacation to a sunny tropical place with a favorable exchange rate and extradition policy (not that it really matters because the issue would be quickly forgotten).

Ask me how I know (actually don't, I shouldn't say too much).

Re:A simpler way.

[paiute]

If this was government work you'd know without a shadow of a doubt that they're laundering political kickbacks through IT projects

You mean they're overbilling and using the overage to fund black ops projects like unmanned shuttles.

"You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?"

Re:A simpler way.

[lennier1]

We all know the drill. Some interns from the mail room do the coding while the Ivy League MBA guys with a major in Bullshitology blow tons of money on booze, drugs and hookers.

Re:A simpler way.

[a2wflc]

I'm sure there is plenty of slush and black ops, but it's also the military getting around political interference.
In the early 90's it was something like this:
The military says "we like the old helicopters and don't want the new ones".
Congress says "we won't fund spare parts for the old ones so you'll need the new ones by the time they're ready."
Supplier says "pay us $20k for a hammer and we'll throw in $15k of spare helicopter parts."

Re:A simpler way.

[Reeses]

You mean they're overbilling and using the overage to fund black ops projects like unmanned shuttles.

"You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?"

Having worked for the government, yes, I do. If it's a one off project. Or only a handful.

There's no "open market" for the government to allow to absorb research and development costs or to achieve economies of scale.

If you need a special inertialess (non-rebounding, not physics-violating) sparkless hammer that can be used in an explosive gas-filled environment, and you need, say, 3. The government will commission and buy 10. The initial development and testing costs all get rolled into the cost of those 10 hammers, no matter how many man hours and resources it takes.

And, having watched the USMC test a piece of equipment in a "shaker box" designed to imitate driving a HumVee over rough terrain, hearing the salesperson from the company say, "Oh shit, there's no way this is going to....." and watching the piece of equipment explode 6 seconds into the test, there's a lot of engineering involved in meeting weird military requirements.

Is there money hidden and wasted in there? Yes, probably.

Does that hammer really cost $20,000 to develop? Yes, probably.

Re:A simpler way.

[rtb61]

In this case executive golden parachutes for when the pay wall falls over. What really kills internet news subscriptions is that it locks you to one news provider because you either read theirs and ignore everyone else's or you are throwing your money away. Truth is different organisation are better at reporting different elements of news and being able to choose the best news source for individual stories, is what really drives news on the internet.

Now that is without fully functional artificial intelligence auto translation services, when that finally kicks in, locking yourself down to one new site when a world of news will be available, will just be so lame.

Re:A simpler way.

[_Sprocket_]

Follow the money.

Someone is getting paid. Find out who and what that person's connection to the person signing off on that expense is.

Sure. But don't expect to always find some nefarious link. The world of bureaucracy is bigger than just corruption. Although bureaucracies do make a breeding ground for corruption and they become more unwieldy the more the system is adapted to eliminate corruption.

I've had a lot of direct experience dealing with government bureaucracy at various levels and organizations (and some experience with corporate bureaucracy). I've seen relatively simple tasks turned in to months-long projects and couple months worth of thorough effort turned in to a multi-year outsourced contract. This isn't because someone was getting a pay-off. This is because The System, of which every good Bureaucrat serves and follows, demands levels of effort far beyond anything anyone not serving The System would think sane. So while the tasks themselves can be simple, performing the tasks within the bureaucracy requires many more additional steps that require many more man-hours to accomplish.

I should stress that corruption can still rear its ugly head. I haven't viewed it very often myself. But I've dealt with rules that have come in to place to close a loophole exposed by someone who had figured out how to game the system and got caught doing so. There will be people that are gaming the system according to these new rules and the process will repeat itself (as well as the occasional case of someone who thinks they won't get caught doing something others got caught doing).

Re:A simpler way.

[flyneye]

I think you'll find that since a duck-like gait and duck-like vocal patterns indicate duck,then...
Based on human capacity to pretend the king is wearing no clothes, one should also check travel plans of those whose hands the money landed in.
The con game as an avocation is based on the owners of money being gullible enough to part with it.
Based on the average slob still needing tech support for windows we can surmise that firewalls, paywalls, credit cards, servers for this,that and other,code,encryption and all the other things discussed sure sounded like $50,000,000 worth. Get my checkbook Bobby!
Based on the knowledge that the larger the system, the greater the opportunity for mistakes, I would say not only did the NYT get a well deserved fleecing for fleecing the truth and replacing it with spin, but we now have enough "bases" for a ducky baseball game.
That is the news and goodnight.

Re:A simpler way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point: I was asked to embed a video player into a new website design. Downloaded flowplayer, pasted into the code, took a couple minutes.

Until the manager saw what I did.

And mandated a rollback and implementation of the company-approved video player. And a meeting to discuss if flowplayer would have had any advantages. And a new ticket to start the implementation. And a planning to get it done. I kid you not.

If you're a manager, your job is to facilitate developers. This person did the exact opposite. Well done.

Re:A simpler way.

[muindaur]

Along with some accountant using GAAP in the way that makes it cost the most(three legal ways to record almost everything: to show lowest income for lower tax, highest income to impress the share holders, and a middle-of-the-road approach.)

Companies these days care less about the shareholder it seems(just look at how few dividends go out), and more about cutting the tax burden down.

In some ways this is like Activision-Blizzard. I looked at their financials, and they pull in 100 Mil in Net Income with over 4 Bill in profits(even showed a loss of 1-2 hundred thousand in the last few years.)

Also, you can bet your butt that every last computer associated with anyone behind the paywall was fully depreciated for the project: just to add its depreciation expense. I wonder if all the developers and managers needed $2,000 computers too.

Otherwise, having a BS in Info Sys(having worked in IT over four years) and nearly done with an AS Accounting, know that it doesn't cost that much in reality. I worked IT at the college I got my degree at, and then at a corp that liked to spend as little as possible on IT systems. Had NYT done it right, the costs would not have hit $1 Mil.

So it's like the poster above you said, our comment, and cost accounting. There may have been some other factors in it too they used to get that high of a cost.

Re:A simpler way.

[Anonymous Cowpat]

no, no no. They expend 75% of the funding on legitimate business expenses - such and booze, drugs & hookers - and blow the rest.

Re:A simpler way.

[Teancum]

It doesn't have to be all that mysterious. Any spending of government money requires oversight, which is many layers of management to make sure that you are spending the money where it is supposed to be going. That introduces huge cost overhead that doesn't exist in small businesses.

On average, I've found that it takes at least a full sheet of documentation for each roughly $500 that you spend of government money as a contractor, sometimes even more or even several times that. This not only starts with the RFP process (request for proposals) but then you have to show a budget for whatever it is that you are doing, include regular progress reports, and literally account for each and every penny spent, including how the time was spent for those getting paid to do work on the contract. You need at least a couple accountants to keep track of the money, and middle managers who write up the reports and explain what it is that you've done.

Once all of that money has been spent and the reports generated, somebody has to read all of this too. All of those people reading the reports also have to have their own management team, accountants, and other administrators making sure that they aren't simply goofing off either. To watch the watchers, there is yet another whole team with its own budget too.

So simply put, to replace a $5 light bulb in a socket, the government typically spends about $500 with all of the overhead and supervision to accomplish that task... presuming that of course the light bulb is in a public place where no security or classified issues are present, which adds an extra 10x+ multiplier to the whole process.

A small business would simply replace the bulb and be done.

This is on top of specialized parts for exotic equipment like perhaps a helicopter rotor gasket that may require setting up equipment or even tooling a whole production line in order to get it built. In that case, it costs hundreds of thousands or dollars (or even millions of dollars) to set up the production line, and some inefficient government procurement processes will spend that money for just a couple of gaskets, when the marginal cost for each additional part is perhaps just a buck.

If you decide to "streamline" the process to cut out this overhead, then you do get people goofing off or embezzling the funds anyway, so it is better to have the overhead. For myself, I'd rather get rid of the government spending in the first place. If it is important to be doing, if I have the money in my own wallet I can make that decision for myself and get whatever it is that needs to be accomplished so it will be done.

Re:A simpler way.

[pclminion]

Follow the money. Someone is getting paid. Find out who and what that person's connection to the person signing off on that expense is.

Why are so many people in this thread talking about this like it's some kind of scandal to be exposed? Big company spends big money on a little thing. What else is new? Last I checked, being incredibly stupid and inefficient was not nefarious. Unless you own shares of NYT, why does this even matter to you?

I too am curious how and why so much money was spent on a trifling piece of technology, but that's the extent of it. Some of you seem to be getting out your pitchforks and assembling the posse. WHY?

Re:A simpler way.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor

Re:A simpler way.

[telig]

khasim (1285) repeats the obvious, someone ALWAYS get paid. Where does khasim (1285) think "quid pro quo" comes from? The question here should be how much time does NYT need to bankrupt its-self? They just "proved" they have the talent and ability. It only remains for them to finish the deal! Who said "a fool and his money is soon parted"? If a dumb ass like me can think of 6 ways to make money from a free web site, why haven't NYT? It's like "free" dance lessons or book of the month or I really don't have the time or interest in explaining it. Besides, NYT "knows" everything. The Emperor has no clothes! Some one must have told them it takes money to make money. But seriously, this is the problem with all large enterprises. And in biology it is known as hardening of the arteries, or lack of chemical facilitators in the synapses. It seems to me that even God has this problem. Reality has become too big for HIM also! RIP NYT. I will miss them.

Explanation.

[Seumas]

They hired the same guys the government uses to create $10mil Drupal websites.

Corporation

[moberry]

$45,000 for the implementation, and $39,955,000 in management bonuses.

Re:Corporation

[JamesP]

More like

45,000 for the developers
10,423,243.54 in legal fees
14,251,136.87 in management bonuses
7,472,223.45 for (self-)financing interest and opportunity costs

The numbers don't add up, of course

Re:Corporation

[jovius]

The reasoning: $40 million is only $0.005 per every human being, so if each potential future customer paid even one dollar once a year for the content we'd make $7 BILLION profit. It's a perpetual money making machine! Some even pay twice!

Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[dbIII]

I'd lay bets that nearly all of that was funnelled into another bit of Newscorp which charged the New York Times for the work. That's how taxes are dodged and books inflated so that the entire company looks like it holds more money that it does while the reality is less money moving in a loop to turn up as others are watching. He's apparently been doing that one for decades.
Besides, Murdoch's entire collection of newspaper companies is probably worth less than he got for selling a Chinese cable TV network last year. He can afford to prop up the newspapers if it helps stop Google from cutting in to the money he gets from advertising in all of his media companies.

simple

[Anonymous Coward]

- external contractors
- external consultants
- high billing for internal IT Business Analysts, PMs etc.

you never worked on a big it project in a non-it company, did you?

repurposed joke from recently read comment:

[circletimessquare]

http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2067216&cid=35703166

An investment firm is hiring mathematicians. After the first round of interviews, three hopeful recent graduates - a pure mathematician, an applied mathematician, and a graduate in mathematical finance - are asked what starting salary they are expecting. The pure mathematician: "Would $30,000 be too much?" The applied mathematician: "I think $60,000 would be OK." The math finance person: "What about $300,000?" The personnel officer is flabberghasted: "Do you know that we have a graduate in pure mathematics who is willing to do the same work for a tenth of what you are demanding!?" "Well, I thought of $135,000 for me, $135,000 for you - and $30,000 for the pure mathematician who will do the work."

thank you, SilverHatHacker (1381259) for the joke

Re:repurposed joke from recently read comment:

[Psicopatico]

That wasn't a joke

Re:repurposed joke from recently read comment:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well, I thought of $135,000 for me, $135,000 for you - and $30,000 for the pure mathematician who will do the work."

Sorry, I don't believe it -the numbers add up correctly. With finance types it would be $250,000 for you, $250,000 for me, and $25,000 for the ...

Stupid comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples: Creating a search engine from scratch. The main hook is that it is simpler than existing products. User workflow involves typing in a term and clicking a link, and users are interested in it because it's different than competing products. No money (remember, this is before Google Ads) is changing hands.

Oranges: Changing the user experience for a major existing site. Users are already familiar with the existing site and already inclined to react negatively because you're now charging for what was free. Money is changing hands, so a complete system for handling disputes and showing purchase history is required. The whole system has to hook into existing customer service systems. Customer service systems behind the scenes have to be extended. Support personnel have to be trained. Legal considerations for multiple states or possibly nations may be involved. Management needs reporting features.

Re:Stupid comparison

[steelfood]

All they needed to do was get their shit together and roll it out in phases.

Look at the way Google rolled out their search engine changes. It's not the simple interface anymore. Somehow, they didn't seem to have a problem retaining people (though admittedly, I dislike the bells and whistles of the new JS interface).

More than likely, everybody was of the CYA mindset and instead of actually working on the end game, was actually doing as much as possible to defer ultimate responsibility to the next group.

Re:Stupid comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Apples or Oranges, ROI is ROI

Re:Stupid comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

You were on the management team, weren't you! Shame!, for trying to backpeddle and justify the stupidly high cost. Even if you had to do a whole lot from scratch, you could still get away with about $2 million. You could get a team of 10 in for a year at $2 million, and have a whole heap of new software, built, tested and running for $2 million. The numbers floating around are 20 times as much as what should be expected. I'm thinking you could build a whole new paywall site for this much, on its own server, with all new software for $2 million, backed by a team of 10 with all new software. Mind you, mine also includes paying that team for 12 months with 2 months dedicated to needs requirements, 2 months dedicated to base system design and configuration (backend software), 1 month to harden the backend and do proper security testing, 3 months to implement the new frontend, 1 month to test it, 2 months to handle any change requests and last-minute additions, and 1 month to migrate data, load test, and tune for performance. Its more likely that the 2 people doing the backend and the hardening would start implementing right away (I have a script that will run for 25 minutes on a corei7-920 that builds apache from source (automatically applies hardening patches) plus support software including curl, mcrypt, mlib and mhash, pcre, lua, libxml2, lua, apr, mysql from source, php from source (with hardening patches and modules), plus odbc clients and servers, creates all needed directories, sets permissions, and configures all scripts including httpd.conf, httpd-vhosts.conf and php.ini, and also installs drupal and extra modules. Really, the backend could be done in 25 minutes (on a corei7-920, a machine 10 times as slow will take 10 times as long). Custom front ends are more work (I use zen with drupal, so custom css files will flow from the needs requirements). Why oh why did the newspaper not try to determine how much this would cost beforehand, and estimate in the right ballpark? "We want and run a first class operation" sounds real good, but paying wholesale is usually just as good, and paying retail x 10 or retail x 20 is not 'being first class', its 'being grifted'.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think Newscorp owns any significant amount of the NYT. You are thinking of the Wall Street Journal, which they do own.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah makes sense "expenses, balance sheet, debt, leverage..." Nasty bugger.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[charlievarrick]

Great theory but Newscorp does not own the New York Times, it owns the New York Post.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[wombatmobile]

Rupert Murdoch doesn't own the New York Times. He owns the New York Post.

Good question

[QID]

I work for a large, multinational corporation, full of all sorts of layers of management and unpleasantness, and the current rather sizable program I'm working on--months of development and engineering work, lots of hardware, custom-built stuff ordered from all over the place--is still well under $40 million. If this is one of the supposedly greatest newspapers in the world and they manage to spend that much money on so little, no wonder print is fucked. They've done it to themselves.

Re:Good question

[Anonymous Coward]

...that's a huge extrapolation isn't it? Just because the NYT spends money like the Fed doesn't mean all newspapers do. I don't think the Times can be viewed as the model (and likewise business model) of all print news papers.

For comparison's sake

[osgeek]

The Obama administration's web sites for promoting transparency in government were around $34 Million just to keep them running.

1 million for the code

[DrXym]

39 million for the oracle license.

The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[Eunuchswear]

The complexity of the rules makes it sound like a telco billing system more than anything else - all about rating and charging lots and lots of events in close to real-time based on a hugely complicated rate-card. You'd be amazed how many software companies are sustained by this issue. It's expensive.

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2011/04/scaling-and-scoping-nyt-paywall.html

Re:The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

<troll>Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Ayn Rand collected a total of $11,002 in Social Security payments.</troll>

[citation needed]

Re:The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[h4rr4r]

Use google lots of evidence out there. The was a heavy smoker and thought that cigarettes did not cause cancer. When she then got lung cancer she went on social security and had Medicare pay some of her health bills. She was a hypocrite, like most folks.

Re:The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[TheRaven64]

Here you go, it cites its sources, in case you don't trust the tertiary source.

Re:The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[Anonymous Coward]

Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of othersâ"the advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it . . . .

The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the âoerightâ to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own moneyâ"and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

--Ayn Rand "The Establishing of an Establishment," Philosophy: Who Needs It, 168.

Yeah, real fucking hypocritical. You libtards know no depths you will stoop to to smear people you disagree with. Please reach your hands into the back of your pants, squeeze your butt cheeks off and bleed to death.

Re:The Yorkshire Ranter thinks it's reasonable

[GameboyRMH]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Ayn+Rand+social+security+payments

40 million to read fictional 'news', advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

even if it were engaging fiction, that would be a lot. how about who fauxking needs it? folks who must read euphoric hopeful stories of the holycost profitsizing crusades, & the resulting unproven deaths? then, shop for a villa in the south of... where ever there's some above water yet? left?

millions

[Spaham]

They spent so much BECAUSE they already had all the separate parts,
written probably by separate contractors, and had to dig into them, and
make them work together...

Cocaine.

[Drakkenmensch]

LOTS of cocaine.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Dude, shut up!

[jayhawk88]

Look, we told them we had to program an autonomous artificial intelligence agent to proactively scan cyberspace for hackers looking to bypass the firewall using port cross-scripting. They bought it, don't screw this up for us.

Re:Dude, shut up!

[wiredog]

Can't trust those guys from Manhattan.

Kansas, that is.

People should read Dilbert more often.

[Mr2cents]

I'm sure a pointy haired boss was involved.

Re:People should read Dilbert more often.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure multiple pointy-haired bosses were involved.

How it works

[Anonymous Coward]

For a company that doesn't do this kind of work, they would probably have had to hire an advisory company or 2 for advice on how to go about it. This company will send an army of consultants who will talk to every dept in the organization to see how things work and then provide some key points on organizational changes and basic requirements of the paywall. Next stage is for them to choose vendors and once they have been chosen a detailed look at current systems, changes to be done on the current systems to support new paywall, possible migration of all old data to new systems will be done. Then there is inputs from every employee regarding what features they would like to see for them to be able to take on new responsibilities.

40 million does seem a bit much, but easily advisory would have cost them 5 million. Organizational changes, new hiring for paywall business administration and support of new systems would have easily cost another 15 million.

Also they may be adding the cost of any organizational change to paywall project.

It's easy

[HangingChad]

I watched the Navy burn $27 million on a glorified CRM that used Siebel and never got any working components. While that clusterfuck was going on a small team of four people built a prototype type system that was eventually rolled out to production because it was the only one that worked.

The person responsible for the $27 million dollar disaster got promoted and took over management of the working system, which they promptly turned over to EDS to manage.

When it comes to software development, spending more doesn't necessarily get you more.

Re:It's easy

[lordmage]

You know.. NYT probably switched Computer languages each time a new magazine touted the best to use for WEB developing. Reminds me of when ADA was pushed on developers for the US Government. Sink hole. (NOTE: Not degrading ADA or any language, just the constant Man from authority causes much agony).

Re:It's easy

[Rich0]

When it comes to software development, spending more doesn't necessarily get you more.

According to your own post it got the guy responsible a promotion. How is that not getting you more? I deliver good solutions all the time and I rarely get promoted.

People make the mistake of viewing things from the perspective of "the company" - as if "the company" had a brain and a mouth. Companies are run by managers, who often make decisions that have exactly the results they were planned to have - the betterment of the manager.

Re:It's easy

[HangingChad]

>According to your own post it got the guy responsible a promotion. How is that not getting you more?

It speaks more to the competence of management and the quality of leadership. This person producing poor results got promoted. The manager that produced the actual working system, at a fraction of the cost, got forced out. That's exactly how companies end up spending $40 million on a web site that doesn't work, how contractors continue to fleece the taxpayers through government contracts. Because there's no accountability in management. Just look at CEO pay. Company does well, they get rich. Company does poorly, they still get rich. Some company bilks the government out of $27 million dollars on a project they bid at $5 million (fixed price) and the government project manager gets promoted.

Where's the accountability? Anywhere?

Re:It's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

ew Siebel. AT&T Wireless used (maybe still even uses) it on their 3G network. What a total clusterfuck that was then too. Several smart employees figured out how to get stuff done with touching siebel as little as possible. (eg using the outsourcer's phone verification tool)

Re:It's easy

[Mana Mana]

> The person responsible for the $27 million dollar disaster
> got promoted and took over management of the working
> system

I love it. Always, nebulous all-knowing musings and not one motherfucking company project name. WTF do you care? No one's going to sue you, go AC if you're "escared." Citations Needed! Or fuck off, liers.

Growth?

[mangusman]

So I'm curious. What's the projected subscriber growth over the next five years? Is it enough to justify the development cost and investment? Or was the cost primarily aimed at NOT getting hacked?

BTW - anyone hit it yet?

[JackSpratts]

I was on it all day every day last week, logged in and not, and hadn't. Maybe they're rolling it out slowly. If not I'm fairly certain they didn't get their money's worth.

"If that's Carlos Slim on the line we're not in!"

- js.

Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Management bonuses, Marketing, and sending the code to India which required re-write upon re-write upon re-write.

Uhh...

[Panaflex]

Well it's quite possible to "book" the value of a project much higher than you may actually outlay at any present time. Remember, these costs get deducted, deprecated and ultimately reduce tax burdens.

Or maybe it was just hookers and blow...

Re:Uhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you deduct imaginary costs for which no receipts and no records exist then you are probably committing tax fraud.

Re:Uhh...

[Panaflex]

Not imaginary, but projects can include lots of non-developer time. Management, administration, testing & qa, equipment and documentation. If I "throw the whole company" at an issue it can all be included in costs as long as it is recorded.

They oursourced it to ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Epsilon ...

Re:NYC - question answered.

[ThatMegathronDude]

I don't consider that good enough reason to live in Houston...

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[Attila Dimedici]

That's a great theory, except for the fact that unlike Newscorp, the New York Times Corporation is losing money hand over fist in all of its operations so there is no need to dodge taxes.

NYT

[Anonymous Coward]

Tres Simple! 30 for you, 30 for me, 30 for the guy who does the job.

Tygerll

Re:NYT

[PPH]

You beat me to it! But I doubt the people doing the job actually get an equal share. Probably minimum wage, paid in rupees.

unnecessary 100+ with testers

[wiredog]

Testers (good ones, anyway) are vital. A good tester will find the edge cases that the developer never thought of, or the holes in the requirements that the designer never thought of, but that end users will inevitably find.

gallows humor

[circletimessquare]

is best humor

Hurricanes and time pressures

[virchull]

From my experience managing large teams that produced millions of lines of code on schedule, here are my guesses about what went wrong.
Factor #1: A requirements hurricane turbulently blew in one direction without control and consistency. It settled down in the 'eye of the storm', and then management said, 'Oh snap, we want it this way', and another turbulent hurricane blew in the opposite direction - without time or skill to change all the original requirements. These problems metastasize through all remaining steps of development.
Factor#2: Management said, "We need this big thing real quick. Lets get a big consulting firm to do it." Several firms gleefully responded.
Factor#3: Management told the selected consulting firm, "We need all of the big thing to go live at once, and remember we need it real quick." Big teams can be very productive, but only when they are carefully grown over a period of years. Quickly assembled big teams become a swamp that absorb money and grow weeds.

The $40-$50 million is just a down payment. Having built a kudzu swamp to serve an Internet market that is rapidly changing, the NYT will spend that amount several times over in the next 5 years to update it and keep it maintained.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't do things like this, would they still be losing money hand over fist? You know this can't be the only vastly overpaid project they have going.

agreed

[cheekyboy]

What I hated from experience is that Company A that makes billions per year is willing to spend $1M on some crap solution, that could be easily made in house in 6 months for less than $100k in salary between 2-3 people.

In the end you own the IP and have no ongoing costs, is that so hard to conclude?

STOP outsourcing god damn it , if you have to oursource, and the external company can make $$$ profit on it, then thats proof enough that you can do it cheaper and own the IP.

Oh and its not cheaper to outsource to some palm tree huts or village idiots. 2 years in some fake college in some downtown cafe / jungle university is not the same as the John Conner hacker aka Terminator / Tron. Singing tunes doesnt make coders.

Re:agreed

[Eponymous Coward]

STOP outsourcing god damn it , if you have to oursource, and the external company can make $$$ profit on it, then thats proof enough that you can do it cheaper and own the IP.

This is way too simplistic and often wrong. First, IP ownership is almost always negotiable. Secondly, comparative advantage works for corporations as well as for countries. There are bakeries all of the country making money by supplying hamburger buns to McDonald's. Do you really think McD should bring that all in-house?

It's crazy that the NYT spent so much money on a paywall. It makes no sense at all. They should have funded 40 start ups to try to find a way to make more money from the news. Rather than trying to innovate and find the future of news, they spend money trying to preserve their old business model.

Re:agreed

[fifedrum]

> It's crazy that the NYT spent so much money on a paywall. It makes no sense at all. They should have
> funded 40 start ups to try to find a way to make more money from the news. Rather than trying to innovate
> and find the future of news, they spend money trying to preserve their old business model.

QFT. They could have funded 40 start ups to try and find a way to make money (not necessarily on the news). This project should have cost around $50k and a week of development time.

This ludicrous overhead is the reason the NYT will cease to be a functioning business in the near future.

Re:agreed

[Eponymous Coward]

This ludicrous overhead is the reason the NYT will cease to be a functioning business in the near future.

During the early to middle part of the 2000's, money was very cheap and readily available. For some reason, the management decided to take advantage of that cheap money and they took on huge debt. Now, the cost of that money has gone up quite a bit and they are really struggling to pay the interest. If they wouldn't have taken on that debt, they would actually be in pretty good shape right now. Don't blame the internet for problems at the NYT, blame financial mismanagement.

Re:agreed

[TheRaven64]

STOP outsourcing god damn it , if you have to oursource, and the external company can make $$$ profit on it, then thats proof enough that you can do it cheaper and own the IP.

Not so obvious. You couldn't develop a replacement for MS Windows in house for less than the cost of just buying a copy, because Microsoft subsidises the cost of your copy of Windows with money taken from the billion or so other customers. If it's a one-off product, then you're right.

Of course, this is the main advantage of open source - if five companies all have the same problem, it's much cheaper for them all to pay 1/5 of the development costs and get an open source license to use the resulting code than it is for each of them to develop their own solution. If the resulting product is BSD or similar licensed then there is little difference between the license that they get and owning the product outright.

Re:agreed

[DavidTC]

There are bakeries all of the country making money by supplying hamburger buns to McDonald's. Do you really think McD should bring that all in-house?

At this point in the US economy, with this analogy, McDonalds is a building with a loudspeaker that connects to India to take your order. McDonalds then calls up a Indian burger place (Yes, I know that's crazy.) and have them make a burger for you, and UPS to deliver it.

There's a difference between 'not starting from scratch' and 'not actually making a product'.

Re:agreed

[DavidTC]

'Buying' stuff and 'outsourcing' stuff are not the same thing.

Anything for sell in the marketplace that is outside your industry, obviously you should just buy it. A fast food place isn't going to make its own tables. OTOH, a lumbermill might.

The problem is when companies need custom stuff and start leasing it without realizing that. Software requires constant maintenance because requirements change, and if it does, you should make your own.

Otherwise, the company will be forever at the mercy of whatever company they have hired to do that, especially if the software is so shitty that only they can manage it, which is often the case.

Usually, they'd be better off just hiring programmers and writing it themselves.

Re:agreed

[Teancum]

This comparison to McDonald's Restaurants and the bun bakeries is really missing the point here, and not very accurate. There are several factors that apply to why bakeries are not "brought in-house" for the restaurant, not the least of which is the screwed up employment rules that often exist where McDonald's may be prohibited by law from even baking bread in the first place. Add in union membership (presuming most bakeries are unionized in the area), unemployment compensation, other taxes, and "human resource management", it becomes nuts to get started.

Add onto that economies of scale where one central bakery can much more efficiently produce many more buns than if some bread oven was put into each restaurant, and that pushes the case over the top to give the edge to some contractor.

McDonald's did have to go so far as to buy farms, hire farmers and ranchers (for the cattle), and even built their own slaughterhouses and potato processing plants when they moved into China and Russia. If you can't get what you want when you want it, sometimes the stuff does have to be brought in house. You might be surprised to find some bakeries that are in fact owned in part or in whole by some franchisee or perhaps the McDonald's corporation itself. I certainly wouldn't dismiss the potential.

Re:agreed

[Eponymous Coward]

I think you are agreeing with me. I was disagreeing with cheekyboy who said:

if you have to oursource, and the external company can make $$$ profit on it, then thats proof enough that you can do it cheaper

I was merely trying to point out that outsourcing makes a great deal of sense sometimes.

derp

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, and we won't tell you that the Congress handles the budget and taxation and stuff like that, not the White House.

Re:derp

[AK Marc]

The President signs it. I find it hilarious (in the "the country will fail and it will be their fault" hilarious) that the conservatives point to Congress every time this is brought up, when it was Clinton personally who did it. How? He stopped signing the extensions that didn't meet his budget requirements. The federal government shut down more than once because there was no funding. So he personally did it against Congress, not with them.

But at the time, the conservatives were livid that he actually affected the budget. How dare he actually use his power to force a balanced (well, close enough, depending on your accounting) budget.

Not as crazy as it sounds...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you bother to read the article, the "paywall" is pretty complex. It's not just a typical "log in to get access". Depending on where the user is coming from and what they've already done, they may get partial access, no access, full access, access with ads, etc. I suspect that the system went thru a lot of iterations of execs laying out requirements, seeing the result, and then saying "oh no, that's not what we want".

The NY Times revenue listed was $2.4 BILLION, so it's not like spending an extra few million dollars is going to make or break them. OTOH, if the extra spending actually preserves their revenue, it's well worth it.

Re:Not as crazy as it sounds...

[PPH]

I suspect that the system went thru a lot of iterations of execs laying out requirements, seeing the result, and then saying "oh no, that's not what we want".

Time to review an appropriate lesson which never seems to be learned:

"At some point it becomes necessary to behead all the architects and begin construction."
-- Abi-Bar-Shim (Project Mgr. - Great Pyramid)

Re:Not as crazy as it sounds...

[murdocj]

I suspect that the system went thru a lot of iterations of execs laying out requirements, seeing the result, and then saying "oh no, that's not what we want".

Time to review an appropriate lesson which never seems to be learned:

"At some point it becomes necessary to behead all the architects and begin construction." -- Abi-Bar-Shim (Project Mgr. - Great Pyramid)

This reminds me of a funny story. Intro college computer class. Prof gives students assignment, then changes up the assignment after a week or so. Student gets all pissed off about how unrealistic it is that assignment would change. :)

Do you really think that for something this complex, where the NY Times is trying to define a new business model, the dev team is going to get a fixed set of requirements up front? It's a lot better to iterate and spend a few more millions than it is to deliver the original requirements and go out of business.

Re:Not as crazy as it sounds...

[PPH]

Do you really think that for something this complex, where the NY Times is trying to define a new business model, the dev team is going to get a fixed set of requirements up front? It's a lot better to iterate and spend a few more millions than it is to deliver the original requirements and go out of business.

Been there, done that (sort of).

When I worked for Boeing, I was a part of a group that was tasked to replace a $250 million POS (piece of sh*t) group of interconnected systems that managed engineering data and delivered it to the shop floor. The internal politics of the situation was such that the managers of each legacy piece were not going to let go, or give us requirements unless it was over their cold, dead bodies. So we started building the new system in a modular fashion. So that as each subsequent piece was analyzed, requirements developed and new functions built, they just plugged in easily. When it was all over, it took 6 of us about two years, cost about $5 million (including Oracle and other licenses), worked beautifully and kept the FAA from pulling Boeing's manufacturing certificate.

Its not difficult to design a system knowing that requirements are incomplete and parts will have to be added as time goes by. Too many projects are envisioned as big, mololithic applications loaded with features that are planned to be designed, built, placed into production. And then the development staff is let go. The source code lost. And a few years down the road, nobody can figure out how to add just one more function without having a corporate seizure.

Re:Not as crazy as it sounds...

[jlowery]

Sounds like you and I were on the same project! But then, every Boeing software project sounds like what you described.

Microsoft and Apple

[catchblue22]

I don't mean to tickle fanboi/flamewar neurons here, but I think a comparison of Apple and Microsoft is germane here, especially since many posts are commenting on the use of small teams of programmers..

Apple develops new products like the iPhone/iPad using small teams of excellent designers and programers. Only once the basic product is designed, once the base OS patterns are set are the products released, and a broader range of programming staff allowed to mess with it. This allows them to design the basic elements of the OS elegantly. The elegant OS design in the long run requires less labor to maintain. The fact that new Apple products often lack basic features is evidence of this design process. Recall for example that the original iPhone lacked cut/paste functionality.

I do not think MS uses such processes. When they actually do design from scratch, they push products to market quickly with less effort put into elegance. The products are often initially buggy. They then pay vast numbers of programmers to form the initially weak code into something usable. Think Vista and Windows 7. This process likely requires far more money and labor, while at the same time produces inferior software products.

Re:Microsoft and Apple

[ColdWetDog]

What did you do this morning? Spill some Reality Distortion Shield in your coffee? Apple (which may or may not use 'small teams of excellent designers and programmers) pushes out stuff that is buggy as hell. Anybody with half a brain and a reasonable grip on reality doesn't buy any Apple product until version 2 or, better yet 3. What Apple does it that it concentrates it's folks on just a few items compared with the thousands of SKUs that Microsoft has to deal with. They don't have to cover the breadth of support issues that Microsoft does. Deprecating technologies really does work for them. They do seem to be better at limiting feature creep when compared to MS and clearly they have a smaller administrative chain to deal with.

But they're perfectly capable of coming out with impressively buggy products. I should know, I own a bunch of them.

No worse than others but not markedly better.

hey mofo looser

[cheekyboy]

dude, ofcourse we gota listen to the 'clients' ok,
Do you want a ebay clone or amazon clone, or porno website clone.

WTF do you want, we can clone it.

Now if theres 3 layers of managers with too much money thats a different story.

God could create the universe in only six days . .

[NicknamesAreStupid]

. . . because he did not have an installed base.

Oracle-Style Estimating Approach

[cthlptlk]

Start with the client's budget for the project, add 10%, and work backwards. The beauty of this system is that it does not depend on a troublesome time estimate.

The way it always happens

[plopez]

Sort of like:

  Contact a golf buddy who you went to school with and were in the same frat with. Skew bids and and keep out other contractors by disqualifying them with statements like "they don't have the depth", "they don't have the scale we need", "I heard they dropped the ball once or twice", "we should look at company X because they also but our services and/or products", etc.

Both execs or PMs on both sides trumpet the accomplishment and bail out with in a year. They agree to give each other very good references.
The company hired doesn't have a clue and also farms out the work to a low bid offshore contractor. On the buyer side, the new exec or PM is left with vague and poorly written requirements and thrown into a new environment working with an inexperienced PM on the vendor side.
Often neither PM has a background in software.

So hilarity ensues, while the original culprits abscond.

Or variations on that theme.

HTH HAND

Re:Accenture?

[Greyfox]

Definitely not EDS. If it had been EDS, it would have been $120 million, Citrix-based and would have crashed the first time they turned it on.

Oh!

EZ explaination

[pak9rabid]

Internal company political circle-jerking will quickly drive up the price of anything, regardless of how simple it could be.

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[account_deleted]

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Works the same way in the private sector

[plopez]

I've posted this already but go ahead and review it. Corruption happens in the private sector too.

It's sort of like:
  Contact a golf buddy who you went to school with and were in the same frat with. Skew bids and and keep out other contractors by disqualifying them with statements like "they don't have the depth", "they don't have the scale we need", "I heard they dropped the ball once or twice", "we should look at company X because they also but our services and/or products", etc.

Both execs or PMs on both sides trumpet the accomplishment and bail out with in a year. They agree to give each other very good references.
The company hired doesn't have a clue and also farms out the work to a low bid offshore contractor. On the buyer side, the new exec or PM is left with vague and poorly written requirements and thrown into a new environment working with an inexperienced PM on the vendor side.
Often neither new PM has a background in software.

So hilarity ensues, while the original culprits abscond.

Or variations on that theme.

The corruption is there in the form of soft soaping and self-dealing. Looking after your own self-interest before the interest of the company, which is unethical when you are a manager and charged with looking out for the company.

Does this make sense?

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[GameboyRMH]

Oh absolutely, I wasn't arguing otherwise, it's just that the private sector is a bit more discreet about it, they try to cover their tracks. In government, a fuckton of money just disappears and everyone whistles and looks away.

It's like the way a cat shits vs the way a dog shits. A cat hides from view and buries their shit away from the center of their territory. A dog drops a log in the middle of the lawn and then acts like it doesn't exist.

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that is the best analogy to public vs. government procurement that I have ever heard. It works on so many levels.

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[jbengt]

Oh absolutely, I wasn't arguing otherwise, it's just that the private sector is a bit more discreet about it, they try to cover their tracks. In government, a fuckton of money just disappears and everyone whistles and looks away.

In my experience, it's the other way around. Private companies are usually quite open about giving contracts to their preferred contractors; they don't have any obligation to be fair, and long-term relationships tend to breed a desire to do the job well (as long as enough competition remains to keep their prices honest). Government entities produce mounds of red tape in order to "prove" that they are not giving favors to or getting favors from a contractor; their projects are often awarded to a barely competent contractor who submitted a too-low bid, leading to requests for change orders, cost overruns, and corner-cutting.

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[Illicon]

Someone please mod this up.

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[plopez]

low bid contractors are a problem in the private sector too. Sometimes in government bidding, depending on the agency and at what level (Fed, state, local) a law might read "lowest responsible bid"

Re:Works the same way in the private sector

[Vastad]

That is a brilliant metaphor. I shall be using it. Thank you sir.

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[account_deleted]

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$20k is cheap for a hammer

[name_already_taken]

Supplier says "pay us $20k for a hammer and we'll throw in $15k of spare helicopter parts."

That's not how it works at all.

You want some helicopter parts thrown in? The military guys know to not even try that. That's not what happens at all. Everyone is covering their asses. If some military helicopter part fails, you can bet that the procurement chain will be examined. There has to be a paper trail for everything.

Supplier says "pay us $20k for your crazy over-spec'ed* hammer, and we'll jump through your stupid purchasing hoops, go through all kinds of extra work certifying things that have nothing to do with the performance of the item, fill out reams of unnecessary paperwork, send an employee to a special course so they can learn how to enter invoices in your arcane billing system (btw, commercial invoice ~1 page, government invoice ~30 pages), wait thirty days for our first billing to be rejected because of some minor issue (100% chance first billing is rejected, btw), submit corrected billing, wait 30 days for someone to tell us that the contract was shifted to another department and so it has to be resubmitted again (they knew 2 days after we billed them, but they're not required to respond until 30 days, so they don't), wait another 30 days to find that the billing was accepted, then wait 60 days for the payment to show up".

Many companies turn government business away, because the documentation requirements are onerous, the payment terms are ridiculous, and the project may be cancelled halfway through anyway.

*The requirements on military items would make your head spin. Making a tiny design change to a part to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture can trigger everything from having three government people sign off on the revised drawing all the way to having to run a live fire test at some proving ground where they strap your whatever it is to a tank and drive it around, attach it to whatever gun it's supposed to work with and fire 1000 rounds, or shoot at it, depending on what it is. All for a really minor change that was never going to affect how it worked in the first place.

You may think a $20k hammer is ridiculous, and it is, but once you see the paper and testing trail, it starts to look reasonable, assuming it's not an off-the-shelf-item (very few are). Now, if they're buying more than 10 hammers, that price had better come down, but for a one-off, $20k is a bargain. Heck, it'd probably win an award for cost savings.

Re:$20k is cheap for a hammer

[Doctor Memory]

It's not just "crazy over-spec'ed stuff", it's also the small production runs that drive prices up. They wind up paying $600 for a toilet seat because it's a custom size to fit in a B-2 bomber, so they have to amortize the design, mold-making, and set-up (production line, test fixtures, QC and packaging) just to produce 200 seats. Even in-stock stuff can suffer from this, because lots of suppliers have minimum order quantities. So even though they're buying (say) some standard gasket, if the manufacturer has a minimum order quantity, the military pays it because they only need 400 of them and the minimum order is 1000.

Re:$20k is cheap for a hammer

[(Score.5, Interestin]

Many companies turn government business away, because the documentation requirements are onerous, the payment terms are ridiculous, and the project may be cancelled halfway through anyway.

I've heard that as a rule of thumb for Navy IT contracts, never bid on one of those (unless you're about to leave for another company and you want to collect the signing bonus as a golden handshake) because they'll drive you insane trying to fulfil it.

Re:$20k is cheap for a hammer

[(Score.5, Interestin]

The requirements on military items would make your head spin. Making a tiny design change to a part to make it easier and cheaper to manufacture can trigger everything from having three government people sign off on the revised drawing all the way to having to run a live fire test at some proving ground where they strap your whatever it is to a tank and drive it around, attach it to whatever gun it's supposed to work with and fire 1000 rounds, or shoot at it, depending on what it is. All for a really minor change that was never going to affect how it worked in the first place.

I once suggested making a small change to dramatically improve the safety of an item of $Id_have_to_kill_you_afterwards. I was told "we could make the change, but it would require renegotiating international treaties" (this was for real). I can understand wanting checks and balances, but sometimes...

Re:$20k is cheap for a hammer

[telig]

name_already_taken (540581) knows DOD procurement. Remember the $600 toilet seats? Most thought that was highway robbery, I thought the item was terribly under priced! Frankly the best way with DOD is to round can their request for proposal and tell them to send a purchase order. That "puts the shoe on their foot". I learned that from a DCASO administrator many years ago.

Re:$20k is cheap for a hammer

[Stuarticus]

20k? My warhammer is 40k!

Easy

[larry bagina]

They believed Paul Krugman when he told them that throwing away money would have a multiplier effect on revenue.

Can anyone say webtrends

[Anonymous Coward]

Tracking on NYtimes is done by a vendor called webtrends. That's what the ?hp is for @ the end of each NYT address. If you look @ page source, you'll also see webtrends related script as well. Look up lines w/ WT.js in NYT source code for examples.

When I use to work with webtrends at a large IT co, they use to charge an exorbitant amount to track IT co's websites, I think $3 mil over 2 years. Scaling that up to NYT size and the new pay wall features, I can see a large chunk of that $40 mil going to webtrends. Now imagine a free google analytics solution with some money thrown to train the in house analytics people. May be NYT wouldn't have to put up a pay wall and make me use google every time I wanna look up an article. The irony is, NYT will be paying a lot of money to google for advertising in the upcoming fiscal quarters. Why are managers so short sided?

"apple"

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Apple has huge teams, just like every other company. Try and work there first. Apple is a huge corporate machine with a slightly less than average moronic baboon at the top who uses his power to influence design decisions, nothing more.

the norm

[m509272]

outsource, fail, still have money, still have support, repeat

Being stupid...

[rgbatduke]

In reply to:

my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code

.

You don't need to go as far as Google to find a higher degree of efficiency. My personal favorite weather site is the weather underground, wunderground.com (largely because they have superb tropical storm coverage and good weather coverage, and we get serious tropical storms in NC every few years). When I first started to use it (shortly after it was set up as a free service) they realized that they had to fund it somehow and did so by selling advertisements, but they also had users (like me) that hated the embedded advertisements so they allowed users to buy out for a whopping $5 a year. That's right, pay them $5 and you can see and use their site, unlimited usage, on any and all computers you own, no ads. This is important to me because I have as many as a dozen computers and laptops and web-enabled devices at any given time, and can login to all of them (where my login is remembered ad infinitum) and see no ads. No "single machine, single user" license crap, just a practical service, cheap.

I pay them religiously every year, right after my subscription expires (announced by the Return of the Advertisements), which will probably happen in the next month as hurricane season (when I first subscribed) approaches.

I doubt that their "subscription service" -- which works perfectly and sanely -- cost them as much as $1000. I'm guessing that the same people that built the site in the first place took a more or less standard pay-by-credit-card interface, attached a low security db of registered users and profile information, stuck some conditionals into the php or whatever that generates the site's active pages, and voila! No ads if you've paid them and logged in and have a valid cookie.

If the NYT IT and management people weren't acting like complete idiots, they would have simply cloned this for the NYT. I'd pay them $25/year for the same access I have now (unlimited, that is) without advertisements, no crap associated with how many machines or what kinds of machines I use to access it. It's really more of an honor system login, and they make their money per household and in exchange for specific value.

20 million subscribers at $25 each is $500 million dollars. That's a good sized chunk of change given the zero marginal costs for internet distribution of content. Well, not quite zero -- but at most a fraction of a percent of the gross. The other 99+% is there to use to continue to buy all of those fancy reporters and cushy travel arrangments and so on, or to use as profit. And I'd even tolerate a limited number of ads onscreen (much as they have now) and still pay them that much money. What I won't do -- what almost nobody will do, I think they'll discover -- is pay them $300+ a year for access. Are they insane? There will be thunderclaps as they air rushes in to where their internet user base used to be...

If in fact they spent $40 million for this as opposed to $4 thousand or even $40 thousand for what is at most a week's work for any competent web developer, well, that simply demonstrates that they are too stupid to live. Nobody on slashdot will then be terribly surprised if they eventually die. The fact that they are charging paper delivery prices for an internet service only underscores their utter lack of brain. Maybe the slap in the face the market is about to deal them will wake them up. But I doubt it.

rgb

P.S. to Slashdot humans! The Wunderground Way is also a good way for you to fund. Wikipedia humans (if any are reading Slashdot today)! This would also work marvelously well for Wikipedia -- $5/year for unlimited usage ad-free, otherwise sure, sell ad space on the Wikipedia pages. I do my best to give Wikipedia money every year anyway, but "volunteer" contributions are a pain to raise and honestly a pain to (remem

That's some Creative Accounting

[thewils]

Ever wonder why the CEO always seems to wander by one afternoon when the project is in development? It's so he can give himself a $39M bonus on a $1M project and gets to write that off against taxes.

Get with the times, Times

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably should've used elance, odesk, guru or rentacoder (now vworker).coms.

Bonuses.

[Fuzzums]

Nuff said...

But it won't actually do what they want it to

[painandgreed]

IMHO, sure, you'll have a great system that does exactly what those 6 people wanted it to do, and probably whatever the person that hired them to do it wanted it to do. However, everybody will find out that it doesn't do all the things that the new system was supposed to do, entire departments will have been left out of the process and not even recognized in the new system, interfaces will have been broken and not able to be integrated into the new system, and in the end, the company will either have to run the new and old system at the same time to keep the work being done, or the part of the $45 million that was saved by letting these 6 people will do will have to be more and spent by all the other departments brining their systems up to match the new system that was created.

Web Developers Gotta Get Paid

[Agamous Child]

http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html

Is it accurate?

[thebian]

I don't think the paywall is a smart idea for the Times. It jeopardizes the business and if that fails, we all lose.

But is this $40 million figure true?

It's not impossible, but just because Bloomberg said it and a bunch of people repeated it, it ain't necessarily so.

Ill defined requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

My hunch:
- Unrealistic customers - I want a Ferrari that pulls my 5th wheel.
- Requirements are ill defined since there is no vision. They probably churned requirements a number of times.
- No one can make decisions to move the project forward. Always in a holding pattern.
- No software architecture and no software architect. Immature product development.
- No compromising between business and engineering till the money runs out.

I've been on projects that took forever to figure out what we were building. At that point so much money was wasted we built something just to show we did something. The NYTimes is a classic example of a company that has only a fussy vision for making money on the net. Lots of opinions and lots of people who do not want to take any real risk should the business case fail. This always leads to high costs since there is no real direction.

Re:Ill defined requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

As hunches go, that is clairvoyant. I like the cut of your jib?

Krugman did it...

[steak]

here is an itemized breakdown of costs

$39,999,900.00 -- Fees paid to Paul Krugman to bless the project with his noble prize winning "You have to spend more money than you have, to make money" theories.

$100.00 -- Fee paid to developer to slap something together the night before launch

Irony

[ThatsNotPudding]

Follow the money.

So if history is any guide, the Times will have to wait and read the story in the Washington Post.

It's their plan to pay Zero taxes

[opusbuddy]

Only not as transparent as GE.

Actually had a twerp from NYT Tech support tell me this morning that they had a new iPad app. True, 2.0.4 (the only version on the appstore) was new on April 1, 2010.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain.

Re:It's their plan to pay Zero taxes

[geekoid]

GE paid taxes.

This is not how to avoid taxes, stop being clueless. They would use a double irish and a sutch sandwich.

Both of which sound like sex moves, but they aren't.

This is 2 things :
1) most people have no clue how much shit costs at large scale
2) Management

This is neither a tax dodge, nor is it fraud.
.

Re:It's their plan to pay Zero taxes

[Phantom Gremlin]

Actually had a twerp from NYT Tech support tell me this morning that they had a new iPad app. True, 2.0.4 (the only version on the appstore) was new on April 1, 2010.

The info in the App store is a little misleading. If you search for the NYT app it says April 1, 2010. But if you actually click for more details, you see that it was updated to version 2.0.4 on December 23, 2010. So it's not as out of date as it appears to be at first glance.

You forgot to add

[publiclurker]

that the PHB's big idea often violates one or two national laws and at least one physical law. then when reality steps in, it's the working stiffs who are blamed for hindering the PHB's "big Idea" by not being able to do his bidding.

not saying...

[PsiCTO]

I really have nothing to add other than to say I'm not saying I had anything to do with this.

Of course, there's a clause in my contract saying my new R8 license plate has to be NYTPYWLL

:-)

Re:not saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mom has "Pay Wall" tattooed above her vagina.

Re:not saying...

[PsiCTO]

So you're the guy Dad surprised at home last night. Shame on you...

Another Book

[Safety Cap]

MMM can be complemented with "Peopleware": another management-must-read (that they never do).

My guess: Consulting

[sarkeizen]

If I were to point out something in IT which consumes large amounts of money and produces very little of value. The answer is usually consultants. I've dealt with some from small specialized firms and others from large well-known firms and I have yet to be involved in a project where they actually provided technical expertise.

Far more often consultants are like diplomats they go to stakeholders find out what people want - hopefully remove truly stupid ideas - and then campaign for those ideas. No matter how ridiculous.

it's called CYA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a CYA tactic. In a large corporation, it's easy to overspend because no one wants to be embarrassed. Simply stated, it's embarrassing to the company if it fails simply because it didn't spend enough on a winning solution. So in order to cover all bases, the company always overspends. First they overspend on top tier consultants who create rosy projections and forecasts. Then they overspend on top tier development firms and agencies to design and build it out. And once it's all said and done, if it was a success, then any price would have been okay. But if it failed, well...then there's no one person to point the finger of blame on...after all, didn't they hire the smartest consultants on earth to forecast their projections and didn't they hire the best developers on earth to execute the strategy?

My two-cents on the NYT paywall is that it's a retention strategy for their dead tree business. They could have priced the online-only tier in a way that would have captured at least some of the freeloaders, but it would have still possibly cannibalizes their physical paper subscriptions. So rather than risk that, they've made some ridiculous online-only price that no one will pay in an effort to make unlimited online viewing seem like an attractive value-add to their otherwise declining dead tree business.

Re:it's called CYA

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what the paywall is precisely about. I've seen a lack of commenting on this very point. It is a retention strategy plain and simple. Its funny that digital subscriptions have very little to do with digital. Too many people are trying to argue the merits of their strategy and about the holes in the fence. When you consider this point, you realize all that other crap doesn't matter.

Probably most was spent on marketting

[morikahnx]

I'm assuming its just like the Pac-Man port to Atari. Most of the money was spent on marketing their product, not developing it.

I'm a developer in telecom

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see your 6 people handle all the interworkings between all the different flavours of ITU protocols.

I'd like to see your 6 people handle testing your product in all the different countries in the world.

I'd like to see your 6 people handle system stress testing, all the various forms of regulatory compliance testing, licensing, track security vulnerabilities, keep up with field issues, and work on the next version of the product simultaneously.

Sometimes a big project really does need a big team.

The Dynamic: Red Tape v. Fraud

[cmholm]

Your points re US Federal procurement are good, and apply to state and local government and large business procurement and project management.

To some extend, this is because it's always easier to add processes than remove any... but, why add any in the first place? Prevention of fraud and malfeasance. You can have a fast, low overhead system, or you can have processes to try to prevent internal and external rip-offs. Finding a sweet spot is a bear, and the target is always moving.

Example, red tape: the Federal Government buys a few squadrons of F-35s. In exchange for added cost and development time, the DoD gets a warm fuzzy that the product will meet spec, have care and feeding covered, and be pretty sure a key component isn't from a factory owned by the People's LIberation Army. They put up with red tape to get the results they desired.

Example, fraud: reacting to the unintended consequences of idiotic Administration policies, the US Army and Marines quickly develop the tactic to buy off the Iraqi Sunni insurgency. The DoD ships billions of dollars in cash into the theatre of war, and it works. Also, later audits can't account for a few hundred million. They put up with fraud and theft to get the results they desired.

Re:The Dynamic: Red Tape v. Fraud

[(Score.5, Interestin]

reacting to the unintended consequences of idiotic Administration policies, the US Army and Marines quickly develop the tactic to buy off the Iraqi Sunni insurgency. The DoD ships billions of dollars in cash into the theatre of war

If I was the DoD, I'd be asking for my money back around about now.

Re:Why? Rupert likes to keep money moving around

[dbIII]

Newscorp's papers have been bleeding money for probably close to a decade, but as others pointed out I know so little about the NYT that I thought it was part of Murdoch's stable. The theory is that leaders and their staff read newspapers so they provide influence. I don't know how much that is true any more but that's what is suggested when people ask why Murdoch didn't con somebody into paying a lot of money for his papers years ago.
Now as to why the NYT is following the Murdoch strategy of paywalls and losing customers when THEY cannot afford to lose money like he can - WTF?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What did they spend the $40-50 million on?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Booze and Hookers, obviously.

On a related note, I'd have done it for 20 million.

Just sayin'...