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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
$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.
Because I could give two shits less about what some private company does with their private money.
My governement, spending my money does peek my interest.
If it was in corporate America, whoever authorized it would be fired and the CEO would have some explaining to do to the shareholders. "Nobody" would hear about it since it doesn't really affect anyone.
This, however, is the government wasting everyone's money.
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.
If it was corporate America, the company that spent money in this fashion might go out of business. That is how the market works.
Your defense of government is shameless. Your defense of an expense useless app as a "mistake" is indicative of the stupidity of the statist crowd.
I expected nothing less from the Slashdot crowd.
$2000 for the apps and $198,000 for the FAR reporting.
I'm sure a private company like Eastern Research Group could have done it for much less than that!
That depends on if it was a smart private company. Private companies are there to make money. If someone is waving around a huge fat wad of cash calling for an app, you really need to quote just under that amount, but deliver the best that money can buy for that price. Especially with governments, it isn't about offering the cheapest price (though that does come into it) but often if a budget has already been set and approved, anything under that budget is fair game the b'cats won't flinch. Now, I am not saying sell them a $10 app for $200k, but if you have $200k of development funds to use, give the customer an app that is worth what they paid for it.
This is where truly good companies stand out. If you have a ship of fools running a company, they will likely burn through development costs, making mistakes, paying the wrong developers and end up with a rubbish product. If you have a strong tight company, they will also go through the same budget, but the final product will be fantastic.
The problem is that sometimes it is hard to differentiate the the ship of fools company from the legend company - especially by b'cats who think that a power point presentation is a wonderful way to demo what a final product can do.
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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.
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The version with spell checking costs $300K.
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.
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I get that many, many people believe that the people belong to the government (hence your post, for instance) but that is dead wrong. The government does not "represent" the people. The people ARE the government. The government's money IS the people's money. You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach. Your attitude is the problem, not the solution.
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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.
Here is a link to the code
There's probably a reason it's calculating 140F in boston.
Ya, and depending on how involved those tasks are, that doesn't sound all that unreasonable, it's just an excuse of politicians to yell about things. Developer churn is about 10-11k/month at the best of times, so 10 'man months' of developer time (3 people for 3 months + some of a manager) gets you pretty close to those numbers. In all of that you have to develop, verify, test, test compliance (accessibility etc.) before you can distribute.
Those figures actually seem pretty reasonable. Not only do you have a 'developer' but you have to have an artist, there's oversight and meeting time to arrange it etc. Oh and since it's a private company, they need to be making moneywhich is probably 10-20 %. +
I'm working on a mobile project right now, where we have 9 'sub modules' of the app, which are done, and we're going to add 3 more across 3 platforms, one for bus location services, one for building room locations, one for exam schedules. The planning for this involved 7 people, (this is for a student project that will be deployed for a production system), two people from ITS, the two course developers/instructor/TA (one of those is me), two people from legal, and security about how we handle some information with students (or don't), and then the undergraduate chair. We've had two meetings already, which if you price it out, for the work done for the meetings plus development time, you're looking at already having spent 10k or so, and we haven't actually got formal requirements, nor have we let students touch a line of code yet. This is going to run, just on our end, about 40-50k, and that's with students doing the actual programming. And we already have art assets to be pulled from our communications department, but those cost money to make too, and the actual services themselves needed to be created (which cost a LOT of money, we're just doing the client).
So in short, that seems about realistic. And that's the problem, people are going to jump up and down and complain, but from what I can tells this seems about reasonable value for money. You may disagree with if the money should have been spent at all (and that's a valid ideological position I suppose), but it doesn't seem like it's that far off base.
Also, I'd kinda like to see the government offer more web and mobile services where appropriate. That might mean that you spend some time on simple stupid things while you learn just what is involved, and as with any spending programme, some things you spend money on will turn out badly. But that's alright.
They almost certainly contracted a private sector business to do this for them, and this was the bill they got.
This app worked fine on my devices.
What we have here is:
A person notorious anti government
A person who doesn't know what a heat index is
And someone who makes shit up.
So take everything that site has to offer with a grain of salt.
Can you really trust a review of this app by someone who doesn't know what a heat index is?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Really? How would you know?
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
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.
No, if it was corporate America whoever authorized it would be promoted and the problem would disappear with creative accounting. Anyone who thinks big corporations are less wasteful of money than government has never experienced big corporation life. The government has to put all their dirty laundry out in public, corporations don't.
Because selecting the colors of the app will require a six week focus group.
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You have it wrong.
If a budget has been approved, the bureaucrats have an incentive to award the bid that exactly matches the budget, because otherwise next years budget will be cut.
You would be amazed at what gets approved at the end the year of a well run department that is well under budget. (at least I always am.)
Work bio at MMWD
b'cat == Bureaucrat
I abbreviated because that's one of the dozen or so words that I can never remember how to spell correctly, no matter how much I try or how embarrassing it is personally, due to rare use and asinine spelling it always manages to slip through the cracks.
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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?
You should care that your government' s productivity is the same as what you could get from the private company. You should care that the people telling you that government productivity is worse than private business' are lying, depending on private business secrecy and low standards to con you. Because those people are destroying the government that is the only thing protecting you from the private businesses that manufacture these lies.
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make install -not war
No, corporate America wastes money like this all the time. You just don't hear about it, because corporate America isn't as transparent or accountable as even the US Federal government. And because the Federal government propaganda about itself can't compare to Corporate America's.
You might have noticed that corporate America got bailed out by the Federal government, and far from the first time. Because corporate America totally blew their business, relying on secrecy and propaganda to get so far wrong before running out of rope.
This app might be far too expensive, but it's not useless. You corporate anarchists ("libertarians") refuse to acknowledge how much many people's lives benefit from things that don't do you specifically any good - but the same is true about benefits to you that others don't need.
And along the same lines you judge the entire government, which is literally millions of times bigger than this project, by its highly visible mistakes. Yet $200K mistakes that are indeed truly worthless are made all day, every day by private businesses. But since you (mostly delusionally) aspire to someday owning your own multimillion dollar corporation, you ignore their tendency to waste with impunity - invisibly.
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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.
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make install -not war
Have you ever worked for the government, ever? The reason you know about this at all is because they need a paper trail a Km long. The government cannot, and does not do anything without layers of approvals, analysis, and more approvals. That cost money.
If the government is going to say it, they probably have to run it by an expert. That's a 10k consulting fee for the guy to talk to you.
The 'unfinished' blackberry app is telling at 40k. 40k is the price of getting a sufficiently working prototype, that they can decide it's not worth the next 60k in testing and everything else. And who knows what exactly they prototyped first (which, by the way, I'd still charge you for, whether it goes live or not) and decided it wasn't worth the price. Or that they prototyped for the other versions before concluding they sucked and axed those features. That happens a lot in this business, you get grand ideas, and when you try and do them, they turn out to be bad ideas, and you have to... scale back.
Don't understate the cost of testing here. Especially if you get hit with a platform revision part way through. God help you with government testing. An 'interactive PDF viewer' may have licence requirements, oh wait, did I just say licence? Even if it doesn't, the government has to do due diligence with a lawyer, there goes some money. But back to testing. You have to test platforms, accessibility, multiple OS versions, multiple devices. That costs a LOT of money. I had dinner with a 6 person outfit last week, and they'll charge you 50-60k for a month of testing, mobile or PC. In that time you send them stuff to test, and then you might be sitting around waiting if you have no other contract for them to send back testing metrics, then you iterate, repeat.
What I can write in a day, if it's coming from a company, takes a week, and if it's coming from the government takes a month, since this is a company for the government, it takes a month. That's not necessarily inefficiency, just different priorities. The government absolutely cannot release an app that destroys your phone. I know, I know, it's not doing anything that would destroy your phone. But the government *HAS* to test that, on every version of the code they submit. A small mobile company wouldn't bother to test it at all against some of those things. The government has to at least try and make it accessible, which means hiring a specialist, testing, testing and more testing, revisions revisions and more revisions (and in the end it might fail, so you're still SOL), physical accessibility, etc. etc. etc. Oh and it has to be tested in spanish too.
If the company is handing it off to the government, source or not, all of that was supposed to be documented. In a private company that documentation might be shorter than this post, but someone has to write a 20 page report on it so the Auditor general (here in canada) or the GAO (general accounting office) in the US can verify how the money was spent.
If you actually try out the app (galaxy S II here), it has some location aware services (which don't work in canada, obviously). So someone has had to coordinate with NOAA about the data format and source, because if that changes the whole app breaks. There is a pile of information in it. Sure, the information (and a LOT of pictures) might have been pulled from other sources, but you need to coordinate that with those other sources, get the info, verify it, test it. It also bases it on the heat index it calculates. Simple calculation by itself, but it combines with a lot of information. Every step of development and prototyping of the app needs to be checked and rechecked with OSHA publications on what to do (notably the first aid procedures, identifying heat problems and then the specific recommendations).
Again, it's not 'hard' but it depends on specifics. If someone handed then the 20 or so pages worth of text and diagrams and said 'here, make an app out of it' 200k might be a bit much, but if they had to write t
When you don't need "a regular team", it becomes "overhead".