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Obamacare and Middle-Wheel-Wheelbarrows
davecb writes "The Obamacare sign-up site was a classic example of managers saying 'not invented here' and doing everything wrong, as described in Poul-Henning Kamp's Center Wheel for Success, at ACM Queue."
It's not just a knock on the health-care finance site, though:
"We are quick to dismiss these types of failures as politicians asking for the wrong systems and incompetent and/or greedy companies being happy to oblige. While that may be part of the explanation, it is hardly sufficient. ... [New technologies] allow us to make much bigger projects, but the actual success/failure rate seems to be pretty much the same."
Most articles linked to on slash dot aren't very interesting or are pushing something, but this article was interesting and a good use of my time . +1
This isn't the only place we've seen this. The Pentagon and FEMA have been up to their necks in it for years. The process of getting government contracts is so bizarre and complicated that companies have evolved with "getting government contracts" as their only business model. So the companies that actually get the contracts are the companies that are good at getting government contracts (because they focus so much of their resources on the process), NOT companies that are good at delivering what the contracts specify. This is a natural by-product of bureaucracy.
I'm only asking because I'm on the lookout for techniques to derail a discussion. A "misdirect" is calling attention to something irrelevant but intended to provoke an emotional response. It's used to push more-relevant posts down the page - hopefully below the fold.
You must be new here. The majority of the intelligent and thoughtful discourse evaporated when Slashdot was bought out by Dice. If you want to see what the future looks like, punch in beta.slashdot.org. Then vomit in your mouth. It's been replaced with paid schills and hobbyists. There are a few of us left from the old guard, but we're only here because, frankly, there's nowhere else to go. Every promising new forum website seems to be shortly after swallowed whole by "Web 2.0" and it promptly goes to shit in an effort to look trendy and hip, at the expense of actual content and relevant discourse.
The post you're replying to was not accidental. It was quite deliberate. Like all things Web 2.0, very little of what is passed off as original or user-contributed content actually is. About a third of the posts here on Slashdot are now by 3rd parties who may or may not be affiliated with Dice, who in turn are just subcontractors for larger business ventures; Shell companies within shell companies.
It's part of a new "dark net" of small companies in quiet office complexes filled with nothing but a few cubes and employees who show up and are handed a 3 ring binder with pre-cooked posts and responses to "criticism" of whatever position they're being paid to represent under a pseudonym.
Welcome to the real Web 2.0.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
But I think we all know that a car analogy is needed to explain the healthcare.gov mis steps. Namely, the Democrats drove the law through all obstacles, but then after the elections, they ran out of gas. The Democrats wanted to buy more gas, but the Republicans said the engine is broken and should be replaced. The Democrats asked what engine to buy, but the Republicans had no idea except not from Solyndra. While they were arguing about it, Obama said that the midnight train of 2014 was approaching. The Democrats asked the Republicans to help push the car because it at least helps some people get healthy, but the Republicans said it would be faster if they spilled oil on the road and got rid of taxes on oil. Then the wheels came off the healthcare.gov website.
Here's what Obama himself said about that - "And once it's working really well, I guarantee you, they'll not call it Obamacare. Here's a prediction for you - a few years from now, when people are using this to get coverage, everybody's feeling pretty good about all the choices & competition that they've got, there are going to be a whole bunch of folks saying "I always thought this provision was excellent, I voted for that thing".
You watch, it will not be called Obamacare," -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aN2iuIhcx0
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There are so many websites out there that do far more complex operation, and they seem to have very little problem.
Not really at least not that worked at this scale from day one. The closest you're going to get to needing to support millions of unique users on the first day, and hundreds of thousands simultaneously are things like MMO launches and WoW expansion packs or something like google+. And most of those can scale by replication and sectioning people off so it's highly parallel, or are built on already substantial infrastructure. If you crunch the math, there were only 90 days from launch to end date, and you need to enrol about 25 million people or something in that time (the uninsured who don't live in states with their own exchanges), so the daily load is actually quite high, particularly with a large number of people hitting the site to browse and decide. It's also quite likely that they gambled on more states setting up their own exchanges... and lost.
The backend of games and google+ of those is trivial compared to healthcare.gov, which not only needs to talk to databases from federal agencies, but it needs to connect to dozens of insurance companies with multiple sets of rules and regulations. Sure an MMO needs to do math, but one designer with no technical training can decide what equations to use and if they get it wrong no big deal. When you're dealing with money - and we're talking about healthcare that's going to be worth a couple of hundred billion dollars bought through this site, even a 1% error rate is going to cause no end of problems.
is that it's a simple matter of input from the user, and then a matter of storage of that input, and maybe some calculations along the way - all very basic stuff for today's world.
Input from the user that needs to be checked against multiple databases that aren't yours, that have private information in them. Then talking to multiple insurance companies in multiple jurisdictions with slightly different rules etc.
I'm not saying that excuses about 2 months of failure, but one should not assume this is a simple project, that they somehow did not realize that this would require probably 10x the server capacity they had is a complete failure. But other projects that are huge and stable have spent a lot more than 500 million dollars to get to that point, over a lot of years. These guys were trying to solve a problem no one else has ever had to solve on this scale. That they didn't recognize that is pathetic, but we shouldn't suppose this is an easy project.
True, the code for that ill-fated website was really out-of-this-world in term of lousiness, but in the whole scheme of things the developers play but a very minor role in that disaster.
The ones who should shoulder the most blame are the people who awarded the entire project (without proper bidding process) to a totally incompetent company due to political reason ( read: cronyism )
The ones who should shoulder the second largest portion of the blame are those who, despite receiving untold millions in funding, they hired totally incompetent people to be in charge of that project.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !