Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov

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Tech Titans Oracle, Red Hat and Google To Help Fix Healthcare.gov

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday October 31, 2013 @11:26AM from the with-a-little-help-from-my-friends dept.

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?"

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Answer: No. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-10-31 11:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
1. Re:Answer: No. by BasilBrush · 2013-10-31 11:34 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
  True, but the website already exists. If it's a case of fixing defects rather than re-architecting from scratch, there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system. And multiple people within a team can't work on different defects.
  Defect fixing is indeed somewhat scalable.
2. Re:Answer: No. by Virtucon · 2013-10-31 11:35 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  No but I heard 18 Women can do it in two weeks. The guy from Infosys told me so.
  
  --
  Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
3. Re:Answer: No. by turkeydance · 2013-10-31 11:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  the Mythical Man Month returns
4. Re:Answer: No. by dmbasso · 2013-10-31 11:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  It all depends on the quality of the existing code base. More often than not, it's better to start from scratch.
  
  --
  `echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
5. Re:Answer: No. by sexconker · 2013-10-31 11:49 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  there's no reason why multiple teams can't work on different parts of the system
  You've never worked on anything with multiple teams working on different parts, have you?
  It never fucking works. You need knowledgeable oversight.
6. Re:Answer: No. by icebike · 2013-10-31 11:54 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
  But I bet even one woman could spell cavalry, and know the difference.
  Slashdot editors wanted. No Experience needed. We wouldn't know what to do with experience if we tripped over it.
  
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  Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
7. Re:Answer: No. by MightyMartian · 2013-10-31 11:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Exactly. I think the Linux kernel is a damned good example of how a large number of developers working in very different kinds of development environments, some working in side-projects like Netfilter, are coordinated by one guy intimately acquainted with the kernel.
  You can say what you like about Linus's attitude at times, but the fact that the Linux kernel is running on everything from supercomputers to be Nexus 7 tablet tells you that there is a way to successfully and productively organize multiple teams to produce a successful software product.
  
  --
  The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
8. Re:Answer: No. by Jstlook · 2013-10-31 12:03 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  My wife saw that book on my shelf last night and asked if it was related to a man's period. I had to chuckle.
  
  --
  ---jstlook ---For that is the way of Elves, for they say both yes AND no, and mean every word of it. --- J.R.R.T.
9. Re:Answer: No. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-10-31 12:42 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  That article is so full of contradictory statements it's ridiculous. Which isn't to say I'm defending the excessively sugar-coated defenses the administration made in 2010. But 94 million is an upper limit, and it's mostly composed of private insurers and private companies purposefully choosing to change coverage, not because the law mandates it.
  And let's not forget about the 20-40 million people who will be unable to keep their lack of insurance coverage. What's the difference between being uninsured and underinsured? Maybe I should be allowed to get a car insurance policy with a $100 limit. I mean, freedom, right?
  If you want to diss the ACA, then diss it on its merits.
  I hate taxes as much as the next guy. More, in fact. My combined income is over $240k/year, almost all earned income, so its taxed heavily. It's a gigantic bitch. But you know what? I grew up in poverty, in foster homes. I benefited from a safety net. And the elder members of my family all depend on some sort of government assistance. So I just suck it up, because as the extremely conservative Justice Holmes once said, taxes are the price of civilization. And this civilization let's me make almost a quarter of a million per year. You think I could make that in Mexico, Brazil, or China?
  The penalties for having no insurance are is like $150/year. If you can't afford that, then you have bigger problems--and in any event, if you couldn't afford it the government would pay for it.
10. Re:Answer: No. by craigminah · 2013-10-31 14:19 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  ...and let's hope the US Government has enough sense to not pay the clowns who built that FUBARed website. Interesting Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare website and won the contract in a rare no-bid contract. Very fishy...
11. Re:Answer: No. by recharged95 · 2013-10-31 15:28 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
12. Re:Answer: No. by Anonymous Coward · 2013-10-31 15:43 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
13. Re:Answer: No. by Beeftopia · 2013-10-31 15:43 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Almost universally in software development, starting from scratch is a stupid fucking idea repeated by inexperienced developers.
  For working, debugged, stable code that looks messy, that's almost always true. But this site failed immediately when put under load.
  Now, if the site logic for ONE user is sound, then they could preserve that and put in the infrastructure needed to handle the sheer electricity of thousands of requests per minute. That's what Google is known for, with their vast datacenters and ability to load balance. Oracle is known for databases able to handle high concurrent transaction loads. Red Hat can provide support on a reliable, robust operating system (Linux).
  For 654 million dollars, hopefully the government got the logic and blueprints down for how one user is supposed to progress. Now, the folks who know how to handle the sheer electrical volume of the massive numbers of connections can perhaps install that missing, essential portion of the website. IF of course, the design and logic of the site for one user is sound.
Amazon by qzzpjs · 2013-10-31 11:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
Calvary? by themushroom · 2013-10-31 11:35 · Score: 5, Funny

It's a Biblical reference -- and at this rate it would take divine intervention.

--
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Brooks Law by mccrew · 2013-10-31 11:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

Brooks Law states "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

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Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Re:Will they teach Economics? by Skapare · 2013-10-31 12:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

The government should have done it in-house, using directly hired citizens as developers and project managers. Use top developers that fully understand the selected technology. This site is something that will be changing a lot over many years, so continued staff where most developers already know how it's built would keep it upgraded.

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now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Google?.... by tooyoung · 2013-10-31 12:32 · Score: 5, Funny

Crap, now the NSA will have a backdoor into the government!
Re:Vermont's Site is Toast by BradMajors · 2013-10-31 12:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

All Vermont needs to do is buy a copy of Kentucky's system. Kentucky's system works fine.
Re:Why can't they start over ? by Runaway1956 · 2013-10-31 14:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

That's my idea. Government hired an incompetent contractor to build something. They built a freaking MESS. Just clear it all out. Sure, examine the code, see what the ideas were when they built the site. Take the best ideas, and rebuild the ideas, from the ground up.
Years ago, I was called in to a construction job, where the previous foreman had really screwed up. He built a foundation and wall in the wrong place. We didn't try to make the wall fit into the plan - we wrecked the frigging wall, poured a new footer, and built the wall on top of our new footer.
The site designers need to do the equivalent. Consider the "blueprint", see where everything went wrong, tear out the screwups, and build from the ground up. If that should happen to mean that not one single line of code remains, then so be it. If it means that 1/4 or 1/2 or even 3/4 of the code can be reused - fine. Just get it working. And, do it for less than another half billion freaking dollars!!

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"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Re:Why can't they start over ? by gtall · 2013-10-31 21:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

HHS was supposed to provide the supervisory role. Problem was they didn't have the experience to do such a thing. In a way, they were stuck. If they'd've hired a single contractor, they'd still be in litigation because the others would have sued. Hiring many meant they couldn't use a single company to ride shotgun because companies don't play well together in shotgun marriages.
They should have had the NSA do it. I hear they are quite good a building large systems.