Slashdot Mirror
Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov
wjcofkc writes "The United States Government has officially called in the calvary over the problems with Healthcare.gov. Tech titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google have been tapped to join the effort to fix the website that went live a month ago, only to quickly roll over and die. While a tech surge of engineers to fix such a complex problem is arguably not the greatest idea, if you're going to do so, you might as well bring in the big guns. The question is: can they make the end of November deadline?"
I think they should have just listed the plans on Amazon. Almost everyone already knows how to buy stuff from them and their servers would have handled it.
No, they wanted it done and not outsourced to India.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I guess nobody in the decision making loop heard about Oracle's big California DMV fuck-up.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All Vermont needs to do is buy a copy of Kentucky's system. Kentucky's system works fine.
Being that
1: this code was already created by inexperienced developers.
2: anything created from the group of these titans will by default be superior work compared to the last guys.
Life is not for the lazy.
But all 3 companies listed will have those rock stars that will:
a. look at the code and call is rubbish.
b. ask to rewrite the whole thing
c. charge an arm and a leg to do it within time.
d. run it under agile (so THEY control the requirements, not the domain experts).
Really they should have hired the guys that do turbotax and such.... it works for the type of users on this healthcare system. The above 3 will struggle through it as well... but will milk it for all it's worth.
All I say to the Obamacare management team & Obama: TAKE A STEP BACK, WAIT.... ASSESS THE PROBLEMS one by one, THEN HIRE THE RIGHT FOLKS. This is a knee jerk reaction and will go down in flames. Of course, the valley and wall street is loving it....
Young MBA folks: this is your Y2K computer problem moment. Remember those times: the panic, the flooding of cash, and nothing happened afterall? Yeah, get ready for another internet boom/bust.
Rare? Nearly every government contract offered to the private sector since Bush took office has been no-bid. Remember the deals made during the Iraq War? Every single one of those was no-bid to Halliburton. This kind of cronyism is NOT rare at all; it is the norm, and has been for over a decade.
Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.
When the code is an unsalvageable pile of crap; sometimes it does make more sense, to reevaluate the design, and re-implement the entire application properly, using the old code only as a reference; than to try and repair.