Slashdot Mirror
OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k
itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."
... plus $106,000 for change management.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
Damn, I have to start writing phone apps ! I could then live with one contract per year...
if it was in corporate America nobody would ever hear about it. since it's government, every conservative creep in the world is going to dump in his pants over it. american politics are too stupid to care about.
alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper work
The iPhone version was $56,000. The Blackberry version was $40,000. Together, they were $96,000. It says this very clearly in the original scan.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
They are not developing it in house so it's contracted out. You basically pay about the developer's work + support + your usual for profit over the top charge you know you can charge government. Contracting out work to contractors (who know how to deal with the government) is alot different then contracting it out to actual developers. Of course, support cost doesn't come to play into this as it's never been released but those prices generally include that. Dealing with government is usually a large hassle and priced accordingly alot of times (not that contractors don't take advantage of this fact either since it means a higher barrier of entry which creates less competition).
By someone that's never written anything more complex than an Excel Macro. Programming is hard. I mean that. I've written some applications myself, and making it reliable (which is kinda the point for something like this) and useful is not that simple. $200k for a professionally built application that runs on reliable on 3 platforms isn't that much. In programming, everything is always harder than you thought it was going to be.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
a large part of that was probably spend writting up a spec, a contract, a detailed list of what part would cost what, etc. etc.
Is this news?
Now, if it were a "Money Saving" app, you'd be on to something.
I'll bet most of that cash went into the rounds and rounds of planning and back-and-forth that come with ANY government project planning process, followed by user testing and compliance analysis. The actual coding process was probably less than 10% of the cost. That's still high, but gov't contractors are very well compensated.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
This is what happens when you rely on a a complex bureaucracy to screen even minimally difficult acquisitions. All of the bureaucratic red tape exists to be able to say "we can account for your money" to the tax payer, but what the tax payer really wants is just to get the damn job done cost-effectively. For a lot of federal projects, projects a few million dollars or less, the simplest route is to give a federal PM a budget, give them the freedom to hire contractors off monster.com and get the work done.
But that would require throwing out the whole feel-good kabuki that lets them employ thousands of paper-pushers whose job is to make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed, but are significantly less useful than tits on a bull when it comes to actually preventing serious wastes of money.
There is a whole little industry of shell companies that 'deal' with the gov'ment for contracts. But for a while it was mostly 'hardware'. With software's little brother.. apps there is no limit what a smart, well connected individual will be able to steal from the tax payers.
I do not, for one second, believe that this is a case of incompetence. Someone was paid not to see. That is the beaurocratic overhead, as it was nicely put, TFA referred to.
Depressing. Fucking depressing.
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
I have no idea how this made front page...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
$96000 / $150 per hour = 640 hours, 640 hours = 16 man-weeks. You have a team of four people working on it for four weeks, you rack up about that much cost. And $150 an hour billed to the government is cheap.
If 4/5 of the 200,000 dollar price tag went to administrative and bureaucratic bs, I could still live off of what's left over. Especially if they just let me sit at the house and do the actual programming in my underwear. Based on the description, I feel like I could bust out v1.0 in about 2 weeks for all three platforms.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Compared to the amounts we've spent on the recent wars.
Show me an iPhone app that can replace a soldier, and maybe we'll get those costs down.
The real question is: How many lawsuits or industrial actions will be averted because of this app? If the legal fees alone would cost more, then it's a pretty good idea.
As a software engineer, my first thought was "Wow, only $200k? They must have found some really cheap programmers!"
Professional developers are expensive. Given that the government is rarely given the authority to directly hire software developers and instead has to hand off work to a contractor, it becomes even more expensive.
$2000 for the apps and $198,000 for the FAR reporting.
You're just a bunch of losers! We (Austrian) got a whole new government-website for just € 500,000 ... with full-text-search (yes, that was the argument why it's so expensive)! Not just a lousy app...bah...
There's an app for that!
So I just installed the Android version of OSHA Heat Safety Tool to take a first hand look and it really is total crap. This is like something a kid would write in python for an intro to programming class. This "app" could have been written in a day by any one of half the people on Slashdot. In fact, I would be surprised if it did take more than a day to develop.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Man, you are sick, you wanna what, to fuck 2000-3000 years old remains of dead man!!!
Not really. Not saying its trivial, but with 99% of the applications out there, the actual coding isn't all that hard for someone who does it professionally, but it *is* time consuming to do it right.
What *is* hard is getting the requirements from your client, getting them to stick with it long enough to finish the project, and then supporting them afterward.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The only way to describe most of the comments here is "industrial strength cluelessness." As in, the coments' authors don't have a clue about product development. They would have made the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie in the 40s, "Hey, I have a keyboard and Jimmy's dad has a monitor, let's write an app!"
Yes, the government holds contractors on tight leashes. Contract assignment is being done more and more heavily based upon past performance -- your last few contracts were duds, you're less likely to get the next one.
And yes, there is a lot of time spent on product specs. Full life cycle SDLC. Agile development where is is appropriate. Understanding the target before you write a line of code.
Exactly the opposite of what most of the code monkeys making comments above are used to.
So yes, there will be specs written before the product is architected. And it will be written for maintainability. And it will be tested before release. And yes, during the initial development period, this costs money. Because, and remember this, there isn't revenue built into the back end (it isn't "sold" or "advertising supported") to pay for fixes, rewrites, and handling customer complaints.
Disclaimer: I'm a government contractor. I don't code. I'm part of the analysis, review, and verification process. And I've seen a lot of extremely complex systems go out on time and work well when released.
Compared to the amounts we've spent on the recent wars.
Show me an iPhone app that can replace a soldier, and maybe we'll get those costs down.
Angry Birds?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Here is a link to the code
There's probably a reason it's calculating 140F in boston.
are you telling me that governments are not efficient at something? Are you saying they don't care about the spending because they don't have to balance the books because they can just tax, borrow and counterfeit more? How is that post office doing?
You can't handle the truth.
I'm really undercharging.
Why can't I sell it for the same price as a picasso?
Really? How would you know?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Better than spending $3 billion dollars destroying 690,000 perfectly usable automobiles.
The code has a default Lat/Lon. I wonder if it's the guys house?
curLat = 42.46;
curLon = -71.25;
Google Map of Location
No. A regular team will set you back around $100k a month: 7 people ($100/hr) just cost 5K daily. That gives you 2 developers, one system engineer, one designer, two testers and one project manager. Two sprints and you've spent the budget.
By all reasonable metrics, the US government is more effecient then business.
Fell free to read the budgets, projects, reports. Warning: You need to be smart, read for hours without being distracted and do math.
They care a lot about spending, it's just that the media doesn't care a lot about truth.
The post office? is fine. It movies 40% of all mail in the world, and private delivery business use the USPS for delivery becasue it's cheaper and more efficient.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Is there a problem? yes. Is it USPS fault? no. It's the treasure taking many, many billions away from the post office and not returning it and then refusing to let the USPS account for it on there books for retires.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
FTA:
Or he could do a bit of fact-checking Fuck, the source is not only available on a OSHA's Web site, it's also available on site the article itself links to.
Looking at the iOS version, there is very little code, and essentially no graphic or custom UI design. According to the original iOS developer's blog, there were indeed a lot of change requests that "began to add up." In light of the public outcry, I'd feel bad for the guy even if he had made the full $56,000 for his work on the app, which he clearly didn't.
Finally, compared to the requirements churn I've personally experienced subcontracting on similarly "trivial" projects in the private sector, a "mere" $56K sounds like a good deal. Taking salaries into account, I've seen Fortune 500 companies easily drop $50,000 on what amounts to a two-page proposal for a project with similarly trivial scope.
So even if "government" is the problem, returning to the trees sounds like a more promising solution than "business."
bunch of propaganda and it's always more complicated than this. is this the nra website now?
Actually i think what it's saying is: when you privatize something (the developing of the app), the government (and the taxpayer) gets screwed out of much more money than they should have because businesses are greedy, and willing to lie and deceive for extra profit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Because selecting the colors of the app will require a six week focus group.
Work bio at MMWD
When I worked for the uni I had a group of part time students who spent their time developing in-house apps of different kinds. If you consider that each student costs $20k a year, over a couple of years working on an app and its iterations and versions, that adds up in a hurry. Even free software if you count the time that goes into it, really adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open Source an free software is just a different way of covering the costs.
Maybe the age of quick one-off apps (many little more than wrapped web pages) and $1 apps and we start thinking that the development costs are equally low.
Government employees make solid money and have job security and fabulous benefits. But there's nothing to drive them, to motivate them. With private companies, there's the profit motive and management holding the threat of firing or reassignment over employees heads to make them produce.
The 64,000 dollar question is, and has been for some time - how to motivate government employees? How to reward success and punish failure without the existence of a profit motive?
I think this concept of government outsourcing to contractors makes the workers worship two gods - burn as many hours as possible and build a good product. It's extremely inefficient in most cases, IMHO. If they only had to worry about building a good product, and were motivated to do so, government could have divisions that produced excellent goods.
But does this beast exist anywhere in the US government or the world? Has it ever?
But with anything involving government, and thus politics, you have to figure out what politicians believe works for them. Until politicians are motivated to tackle this issue rather than just have theater about it, the current system will continue.
Only 74999999 more scandalous wastes of money like this to go, and you can pay off the U.S.A. national debt!
(15 trillion / 200 thousand)
Better work fast though.. if you save 20 000 times as much money per day (4 giga U.S. $), you may actually stay ahead of getting into more debt.
P.S. my joke was going to be 14 trillion, but I saw that in the mean time it has become 15 trillion.
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote something about "innumeracy" I believe.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Of course there is no rule that businesses must be efficient. We just don't know about most of their inefficiency because we have no way of knowing--they aren't required by law to disclose things like this.
And of course they care about spending because there's always some brainsick mooncalf like you waiting around to say "Look! Waste!"
And I know it won't change your mind, because you have a religious (i.e. baseless) belief in the proper behavior of so-called "free market" enterprise, but I leave for subsequent readers the simple observation that, according to the evidence--yes, there are actual studies performed by trained economists--government is more efficient than private enterprise simply because it has no overhead. Where business is all--and I do mean in a structural sense, not an emergent one--about someone at the top skimming a layer of money off to line their pockets, government is merely about providing services to the people.
The government will probably react to this like they always do, add more bureaucracy to help "prevent" waste but in actuality simply causes more of it. The pains you have to go through to get the government to approve anything is insane. Ostensibly the entire program exists to prevent waste, not cause it, but thats the end result. For example an iOS enterprise license costs $399/year, however the labor necessary to get the purchase approved probably cost at least that much, if not more. But thats not how people actually think about the problem and the end result will probably be more, not less, waste.
Monstar L
The source code is available: http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/heatillness/heat_index/heat_app.html
11. Thou shall obey Da mighty Swing
By all reasonable metrics, the US government is more efficient then business.
- by all reasonable metric this statement is not just wrong, it's insane. No business can run decades on deficits with what amounts to unlimited debt, because no business can tax, borrow and counterfeit the way government does.
The post office? is fine. It movies 40% of all mail in the world, and private delivery business use the USPS for delivery becasue it's cheaper and more efficient.
- USPS is SUBSIDIZED.
If a 'business' is subsidized the way government subsidizes every one of its dealings, then sure, the profits don't matter, the earnings don't matter.
USPS is selling "forever stamps" for a reason - they don't know how else to raise the cash. This is with the rampant inflation, and the stamp prices that are held hostage to the political pressure to pretend that inflation is non-existent. What's funny is that USPS will be even more broke (which is funny, any non-government related business would have collapsed long time ago if ran that way), and in a year or two, with inflation higher even than now, people won't be buying stamps then, they'll try to use their 'forever' stamps. Of-course that will put the USPS into more trouble. The gov't will bail it out of-course.
Everything gov't does is a subsidy. They tell you nonsense about medicare for example, as if it's more efficient than a private company would do, but that's more nonsense. All gov't programs are subsidized, their liabilities are moved to other gov't books and you don't see the losses. The spending always grows, the borrowing grows, the deficit grow and the government grows.
And so what? The poverty grows, the problems grow, the wars grow, the collapses grow the education is in a hole, all gov't subsidized systems are bankrupt.
Yeah, 'more efficient'. As I said earlier: with all of the insider trading that the gov't officials are doing because they voted themselves that power, it just shows how incompetent they are, that they didn't corner the entire market yet and that they are not all billionaires.
Good night and keep dreaming.
You can't handle the truth.
Right, which is why the government sucks at thIs. They have a profitable business, the us mail, so they keep piling on more and more costs till it can't pay it's own bills anymore. You can split it upand say the us mail is an example of a govt. agency that's competitive, as long as you discount all the money they have to spend because of regulation. In short, as a govt. agency they Are NOT competitive, but if they were a private company they wouldn't have those stupid costs because they are a government agency. You can't ignore that, government is very very inefficient and it's eats it's young.
I'd expect the cost to get their Enterprise License was at least several thousand on top of the $399. You need the DUNS number, incorporation papers, and signatures... I'd figure at least 100 man hours went into shuffling paper around between the contractor and various government employees.
I see plenty of comments on how reasonable or unreasonable the price is, and they are interesting. I generally agree it doesn't seem that out of whack price wise for a working application supported for some time period.
What I find more interesting is this story is being posted all over the web all of the sudden:
And of course here on /.
Hitting that range of sites (and more) with this sort of non-story story trying to push a narrative of the government is wasting your money? Someone behind the scenes is pushing this narrative, I suspect. Not news for nerds, but manufactured political outrage.
You think this cost $200k? Let me guess, you work for the government?
Every single iPhone app is a better replacement than all the soldiers we sent to Iraq, who merely wasted a $TRILLION, not to mention all the deaths and maimings on all sides, and the years of lost productivity we could have had instead, and the peace itself, and the unrecoverable loss of America's reputation...
--
make install -not war
You mean like the paper reduction programmes at work that are promoted on printed paper documents?.
The government is no more wasteful than private businesses. The government's excesses are just a lot more visible, and Americans have been trained to hate government while fetishizing business.
--
make install -not war
I neither hate the government nor fetishize businesses, but there is a key difference between the two. If business does what the government does, a more agile competitor can come along and create their products more efficiently. That doesn't happen with the government and I have no power to change how a business conducts itself, I have a say in how the government does.
Monstar L
I'm a consultant we do great work (software engineering). We charge our clients 180$-250$ an
Hour. It costs money to build an app, I don't think that there is much of a story here...
$200k is a bargain. I saw a govt project that lasted 7 months, cost $500K, and employed 3 FTE contractors. The net result was a "program" consisting of 1 screen with 10 editable fields that updated 1 existing database table. The database, subsystem, and all enterprise infrastructure were already in place. The only business logic was that the 10 editable fields were numbers ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, when added together their total had to be 1.0 and a message box warned the user if otherwise. The sad part was that when the program manager reviewed the work after project was complete he praised the team as wished other teams could perform as well. Very fucking sad.
When you don't need "a regular team", it becomes "overhead".
Software development is expensive and risky... :)
And It's a sad reality but software development today is very expensive... And if you want things done right, you'll probably have to do them yourself anyway
This is a fantastic example of the power of onions...umn...unions influence. In order to justify their existence, they often tilt the balance of power which invariably results in a waste of resources. I am an advocate of unions, and am certain they do have a place...but as they take on business models they become cumbersome, and more troublesome than positive influences in the workplace for everyone but their direct benefactors. You can debate the first sentence all day, but the second sentence is obvious in most cases. This always happens when a community service becomes a business...invariably.
Compared to the amounts we've spent on the recent wars.
Show me an iPhone app that can replace a soldier, and maybe we'll get those costs down.
Stick it in a guard hut under a tin hat and let it emit random swear words and racist abuse. The Taliban will mistake it for a genuine US soldier and waste resources blowing it up. Of course, battery life might be a problem, but I suppose you could "take turns" like with real sentries.
Why is this an story? Where is the scandal? How much do you complaining morons think it costs to develop an application, in particular one involving a team, and not a single lone wolf?
This is exactly what 'business management' has become in the US. If you don't believe it, do some Googling on the managers and boards of large corporations over the last twenty years. You can see individuals cycling through that very process. It is on the list "Things that make me madder than hell."
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
There should be a website called "usagovernmentXML.gov"
That's what we want and no more.
Although that isn't alot of money, its still shows the arrogance of the government, never asking the community what they need, just plowing ahead because no one tells their budget office NO.
Here's my favorite example. In Oakland TN, the cops asked for 3%raise. A Tea Party rep stood up and said, "The citizens cannot afford any more taxes!". They voted it down, why? Because the TeaParty gave the city council solid backing to say NO.
App hooks to your Cruise Control
I'd personally much rather have iPhone apps than soldiers.
Why does it cost >2X to develop Android or Apple app over a Blackberry one? I could see specs or even code resuse but in that case only 1, not 2 platforms should have the high cost. Does blackberry do something that makes development easier or is there a surplus of blackberry developers out there driving down the price? Or are the blackberry developers just so much more efficient with their time? ;-)
If you think $200k is a waste, start looking at your local school board minutes to see how much they spend on software. A simple teacher observation app (for IOS), which basically amounts to the complexity of your standard HTML form, cost our school district $400k+. Yikes! goo.gl/PruZj
Unfortunately for our district, they did not get the source code, thus enabling other districts to benefit from this investment.
"b'cat" is not a valid abbreviation of "bureaucrat". So much for avoiding embarrassment. Try using a spell checking input device if you can't spell. They're everywhere these days, y'know?
They are designed to spend money, that's why over long time of getting mature they will pay for everything 10 times more then needed, then they will run out of money and all crap begins.
You can't change it really it's been like that for thousands years, all you can do is to scrap the current government and build a proper decent new one.
But this is also not easy and it takes a long time. Nobody was intererested in that so its not likely that US gov will change its structure any time soon and in 10 years same app will cost double because of extra costs of gov management, which is just a paper work, I guess 80% of costs of that app was actually this.