
Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work - dccoolgai
https://themarkup.org/coronavirus/2020/07/16/unemployment-benefits-website-failures-deloitte-ibm
======
cosmotic
Although they aren't mentioned in the article, it seems like a pretty similar
story: I worked for Accenture and they cared very little about the end user,
product, or the client. The things they cared the most about were sales,
billable hours, and reputation. As a software engineer, every review season
completely ignored all of my technical accomplishments and problem solving
skills and focused entirely on growing sales and billable hours. The cherry on
top was the way they treated their employees that were working in the states
on Indian salaries. They no doubt billed the customer ten times what they were
paying the employee while claiming cost savings. The dishonesty, disrespect,
and lack of integrity were palpable.

It's no wonder why projects managed by large consulting companies are total
disasters.

~~~
jliptzin
Don’t gripe, celebrate it! Huge companies getting conned by large consulting
firms creates opportunities for startups. If Deloitte and others were actually
good at what they do, it’s be much harder to compete. Large companies blowing
a hole in their budget so that Deloitte can deliver a garbage product 6 months
after the deadline is the kind of thing you want to hear if you’re involved in
startups.

~~~
untog
Except, no. As a startup you are absolutely not going to get the contract to
create a new unemployment web site for a government. Even aside from the
bidding process that is deliberately set up to exclude small players any
responsible government wouldn't go with you anyway: what happens in five years
time when your startup has shut down (or complete it's Wonderful Journey with
an acquisition) and the site stops working?

~~~
phonon
You _could_ , but would require extensive involvement before the bid, making
sure you understand the organization and structures (e.g.
[https://www.naswa.org/](https://www.naswa.org/) and
[http://www.itsc.org/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.itsc.org/Pages/default.aspx)
) perhaps hiring someone who worked there, plus experience in dealing with
legacy tech.

The RFPs are public, and many states are willing to take a look at new
approaches.

------
SavageBeast
Nobody wants to bring up Accenture here? Why should Deloitte get all the
credit? There is plenty to go around. The large publicly traded consulting
companies are like the mafia - once you let them in the door, they're not
leaving until all your money is gone.

Thats all there is to it. Funny thing is those companies are never brought in
by technical departments. My most recent experience saw the Marketing dept
bring in CONSULTING COMPANY to do a particular job because the internal
Engineering department's quote for the same work was "5 times what CONSULTING
COMPANY said it should cost if they did it".

(queue violent laughter for those who have seen this joke play out)

It was a mess - consultants were as inept as they were numerous but damn, they
dressed nice every day. They all had great glasses too, like they were
assigned by the wardrobe department. Picture a Banana Republic Catalog's worth
of new, very young people running around the office and you get it.

I'm not saying these consultants were inept because they couldn't invert a
binary tree or because they couldn't tell me the time complexity of a
HashTable. I'm saying it because they literally knew nothing aside from the
intensive training CONSULTING COMPANY gave them for this job. If it was not
covered in training they not only couldn't do it but didn't know what it was
in the first place.

The whole project became a train wreck in slow motion. You could see it was
going to be bad but it had so much momentum there was no chance of stopping
it. Must be how the people felt on the Titanic come to think of it.

Things got so insane I realized that the consultants and those responsible
were looking for someone to blame - and I promptly accepted a new job offer
and vanished in a puff of smoke. I would later find out I was on the short
list of people to be "promoted" to manage deliverables for that project!

~~~
phone8675309
After being laid off in 2016 I joined a big consulting company (you've heard
of them but they're not Accenture) because I needed to pay the rent. I didn't
come up through their training program as a new graduate but as an experienced
developer.

Every year I got glowing praise from the client - I solved the problems they
had faster than their in house guys did, I delivered on time with the lowest
defects of any contractor across all firms that worked at the client, and was
a domain expert in one of the client's systems after about six months there.

Do you know what the consulting company offered me as a raise? $150 on top of
my base salary. Not $150 a week or month - $150 total. When my consulting
company reviews came back, despite high praise from the client, I wasn't
enough of a member of the consulting company's team because 1) I didn't hang
out with only consultants from the company, 2) I didn't attend drinking events
every week with consultants from that company, and 3) I was too specialized on
what the client did, so how were they going to move me to another client for
more money?

I stuck around for another year and then the client negotiated hiring me on
directly.

I will starve before I work as a consultant at someone else's consultancy.
I'll start my own one-man firm first.

~~~
thisisnico
Worked at an MSP. Company charged $165 an hour for my work. I was being paid
$16 an hour. This is sysadmin/IT Infrastructure work.

~~~
nmfisher
I'm not defending consultancies here - working at one would be my own personal
hell on earth.

But when charge-out rates are so much higher than salaries, this is because
their value is in the customer relationships and sales pipeline, not technical
competence.

It's far, far easier to replace technical talent than to replace customers.

~~~
DangitBobby
Just because you can make exorbitant profits off of your workers doesn't mean
you necessarily should. I'll never understand why someone would you want to
own a company that treats its people like shit and sucks to work for.

~~~
ImaCake
Middle management can run distraction on the owners so that they don't see the
misery of the operations people who actually keep the buisness going.

~~~
ardy42
>> Just because you can make exorbitant profits off of your workers doesn't
mean you necessarily should. I'll never understand why someone would you want
to own a company that treats its people like shit and sucks to work for.

> Middle management can run distraction on the owners so that they don't see
> the misery of the operations people who actually keep the buisness going.

More likely, the owner is greedy and just doesn't care about how miserable the
employees are as long as the cash keeps coming in. Some people just plain lack
the regular moral compass and feelings of empathy, and others have gotten good
at holding on to BS justifications to assuage any guilt they feel.

------
aplummer
Ex Deloitte here:

In several years I never once saw the firm not deliver what they agreed to in
writing.

There’s one way to deal with a consulting firm: a rock solid statement of work
and people on the client side to verify you got exactly what you paid for.

If the system didn’t work as agreed in the statement of work and that was
clear, Deloitte would be footing the bill.

If you gave out a time and materials contract without clear acceptance
criteria, testing requirements, and verification / support / warranty
detailed, you probably shouldn’t be handling 100 million dollar budgets.

~~~
h0l0cube
> acceptance criteria, testing requirements, and verification / support /
> warranty detailed

Some orgs just don't have the in-house capability to do this, so they seek a
consulting firm... oh wait.

Edit:

I guess the strategy is to hire technical staff, keep them around a few years
until you can be sure they can deliver on projects and understand your
existing systems and processes, and then embark on the larger project to
transform those systems and processes.

Alternatively, shop around to find a consulting firm that is motivated to have
good long-term outcomes. Probably a smaller operation, that has good word-of-
mouth reputation, but doesn't have an established brand to fall back on.

~~~
aplummer
To your edit:

A good strategy is to hire a team, get a few consultants who have literally
built the same system down the road, and use that blended team until 2.X
release.

That way you a team that has made a thing already (and often consultants are
just as passionate about their work too!) ready to build a better 2.0, plus
you keep responsibility and control.

~~~
h0l0cube
> A good strategy is to hire a team

Some orgs may not know how to hire. I think here, competent (and well
connected) consultants can help, and maybe source from their own networks, but
we're back to the dilemma of which consultants to trust. And let's not speak
of recruitment agencies :)

------
baron_harkonnen
I've worked with a bunch of Ex-Deloitte people and without fail they all could
talk forever about the subject at hand, sound very technical, but in practice
were completely incapable of executing anything correctly, and had absolutely
no knowledge of their subjects of "expertise" beneath the surface. They really
are expert bullshitters.

I think the real trick to being an expert bullshitter though is that you have
to forget that you even are bullshitting. Ex-Deloitte people have deluded the
most important person which is themselves. In technical conversations it's
almost as if the idea that there even was something beneath technical talk
behind these ideas.

It's to the point now where Deloitte on a resume is a huge red flag.

------
deviation
Software consultant chiming in here. Deloitte is a dirty word that most people
in the office react sourly to... This doesn't surprise me one bit.

~~~
spyspy
My fiancée is a senior tech consultant at a big 4 firm and I can say with the
utmost confidence that they have zero ability to actually build things. I
specifically watched her project manage a multi-million dollar product for a
client. Clueless. Consultants are good, organized, hard-working people but
they are not technical in the ways most on HN are. And the outsourced dev
teams they hire at bottom dollar will just never deliver anything of quality.

~~~
txcwpalpha
I'm a former tech consulting manager at one of the B4 and my experience is
that the types of multi-million dollar software projects that they get
involved in are lose-lose situations from the start. They are always high-
profile, huge projects that a ton of executives, salespeople, etc all have
their hands in, and everyone is fully aware that the delivered product is
going to be a steaming bureacratic pile of shit with a never-ending list of
feature requests and bugs, no matter who they hire. Then they hire
Deloitte/IBM/Accenture because Deloitte/IBM/Accenture are so big that they are
the only companies that will knowingly take on a losing project as long as
they get paid handsomely for it.

And if the project is gonna be a loser anyway, why would you waste your best
people on it instead of the C-stringers from your offshored development
center? At my B4, the major multi-million dollar government projects like that
were basically the company graveyard where you were staffed when literally no
other project would take you.

For the actually successful and typically much smaller software projects, we
actually had a subsidiary company with a much better reputation that would
handle the design and development instead of our offshore dev centers.

~~~
cpeterso
What is the solution? How can these huge systems be developed economically and
correctly? These government agencies don't have the technical experience to
hire and manage their own software developers and, from what people say, the
big consulting firms don't either and/or they don't care. But a smaller firm
that might be able to deliver a working solution would be seen as "too risky"
to be awarded a big government contract when compared to a large, well-known
consulting firm.

~~~
earthboundkid
Why does the government not have more than a handful of people at 18F? Do they
think computers are a fad that will go away? Government should be staffed to
accomplish its mission, and the mission requires software. 18F should have
tens of thousands of permanent employees.

~~~
omnivore
The problem is Deloitte is in the pockets of Congress and won't ever allow
this to happen. In fact, they've made it worse.

------
dseGH3FETWJJy
Remember the healthcare.gov rollout? It was built by EY and I may have worked
there.

It was being hosted from one of the main developers homes. Let that sink in
for a few...

~~~
rjkennedy98
It was CGI Federal (the US version of CGI) and QSSI (eventually bought by
Optum part of UnitedHealth Group). CGI was the lead contractor and got it by
low balling on the website. When CGI immediately got behind on project
deliverables (2 years before launch) they started forcing all the people to
work 7 days a week which immediately caused every good developer to leave. All
that was left were the most inept H1B developers I've ever seen (some
literally couldn't touch type). I joined 2 weeks before launch as a product
consultant. There were basically no senior people working there at all. It was
a bunch of middle managers and either inept H1Bs or fresh college students
brought on as subcontractors. There is no way it could've succeeded in any
alternative universe. Basically no one cared about the product at all,
everyone only cared about their slice of the pie, and by everyone I mean the
tens of different subcontracting companies and middlemen that were involved.
The only reason CGI even lost the contract is because it was such bad
publicity HHS had no choice. CGI ended up suing and I'm pretty sure they were
given alternative contracts anyways. There was never any accountability for
anyone involved. When I quit I made sure the next job I had wouldn't get close
to government contracting.

------
dangus
I don’t think the article convinced me that Deloitte is specifically at fault
for these systems failing.

They were paid one time to design a system, seven years ago, to handle
probably less than 1/10 of the kind of volume that we are seeing due to the
pandemic.

It really isn’t Deloitte’s fault that our government isn’t willing to just pay
civil servant employees to build and maintain technology in house.

I don’t claim to know why the government is so sub-contractor happy but I
guess that’s the way it is right now.

Also, the government needs to stop thinking about software like it can be
boiled down to a one-time cost. Building software one time and leaving it
alone to rot for a decade doesn’t work.

~~~
bluedino
1/10th isn't even close. In my state you were looking at 40x the volume. And
you have a good point, that much more traffic is probably going to break a lot
of systems.

Not to mention, even if the systems were only down for a few hours or a few
days, the government agencies just don't have the manpower to process all
those claims. Especially when people are working from home or not working at
all.

Then you have the massive fraud. A perfect time for scammers to apply for
unemployment benefits.

Remember the people who don't have computers and call their claims in via
touch-tone. Those systems all crashed as well, or had busy signals for weeks.

------
TrackerFF
Not just unemployment systems. There's a graveyard of broken systems made for
governments, all over the world.

I genuinely believe that their business model is to ship out unfinished and
broken software, and then spend xx years billing them (steeply) for upgrades
and maintenance.

That's of the few explanations that makes a lot of sense.

edit: This isn't only aimed at Deloitte, lots of habitual offenders out there.

~~~
imglorp
It's not clear how so many government procurement systems are broken
everywhere.

As a counterexample of some procurement did work, just a tiny one, my state
DOT rebuilt a major road over a decade. The whole project was many millions
broken out into milestones and each milestone had penalties for being late and
rewards for early, presumably with some quality gates too. The contractors got
it done. So it is possible, just not common.

Another example is NASA batting 1 for 2 on Commercial Crew, although politics
messed up the ULA half of that.

~~~
thephyber
> It's not clear how so many government procurement systems are broken
> everywhere.

One of the two major political parties in the USA actively sabotages
government projects. The other one frequently fails to wield the tools of
government well. Some of the procurement details might not be clear, but it's
not terribly hard to figure out where the upstream problems are.

~~~
mi100hael
I don't think it's typically that partisan.

I have an insider's perspective on one of the systems mentioned in the
article, and from what I could see, politics played no part until everything
went off the rails and they started flinging shit in the media.

Things start out with a few in-house sysadmins hacking together some scripts
to start batch loading records into a database or whatever. At some point they
get far enough along to decide to bring in an external consulting firm to
build out a more fully-featured solution.

At that point, it becomes a very ironic situation. The meat of the
requirements are laid out by career bureaucrats who work in state government
agencies (unemployment, in this case). They are extremely risk-averse because
their jobs are typically very secure and, barring any criminal activity, the
only thing that can sink a career is some sort of publicized failure involving
taxpayer dollars.

So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large,
established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of
requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are protecting
themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty. Furthermore, they want
to go from 0-100 right away and convert an old manual paper process to a
fully-featured SaaS-style product in one go with a bunch of different feature
requests coming from different people.

Thus they ironically end up with a massive risk of failure precisely because
of the steps they took to mitigate risk in their minds. They have no prior
experience developing software and are usually lacking in overall technical
expertise. Really they have no business designing any sort of software
solution or negotiating a contract to build one. It's doomed to fail simply
based on the premise.

The best outcome would be for a dedicated SaaS company to build something that
could be purchased by multiple states. I actually briefly explored starting
something like this but couldn't make the numbers work. These departments have
very little discretionary budget. Selling to each state would require a
literal act of congress, and your TAM is only 53 distinct customers. And
because of the inability to quickly make a purchase, they all seem to start
out with that in-house hacked approach which naturally leads to paying for
consultants to "improve" it, not starting over with a product purchase.

~~~
dragonwriter
> So they negotiate contracts for this sort of work with really large,
> established consulting firms like the Big 4 and include all sorts of
> requirements and checkpoints and little details that they think are
> protecting themselves and would drive the average dev shop batty

To be fair to the bureaucrats involved in a specific project, this approach,
including specific staging of particular waterfall-style deliverables (with
more complex checkpointing and midproject external reporting and oversight
required the larger the project and sometimes on other bases, such as
particular outside-of-the-agency, e.g. federal, funding streams) is often
mandated by statewide contracting rules (a mixture of general and IT-specific
mandates), not something that the bureaucrats directly involved in a
particular project impose.

And while in many cases ill-advised and counterproductive, each of those rules
is typically reactively developed in response to and as a means of mitigating
repetition of specific instances of negligent, incompetent, or outright
corrupt contract administration that occurred in the past.

------
hn_throwaway_99
Question for the HN crowd: My apologies if I offend anyone (sure I will), but
I can't imagine a good programmer wanting to work for any of the big tech
consulting companies. They don't pay very well, their work is generally boring
but tedious, and their corporate cultures are not known for attracting top
talent. If you're a good programmer, seems like the top options are:

1\. Join a FAANG or other well-regarded software company (e.g. a Salesforce-
like company)

2\. Join a startup

3\. Research (academia) or a company that does big "research-like" work (e.g.
the NSA, SpaceX, etc.)

So I just don't see any way this kind of work is going to get done and not
kinda suck.

~~~
alistairSH
Define "good salary". In the DC area, they pay well. We don't have the unicorn
FAANG salaries you see in SV or Seattle, but $150k+ isn't uncommon for
somebody with a few years under their belt.

The biggest problem I see with them is they tend to throw bodies at the
problems. Many junior employees trying to build complex solutions isn't
efficient. Even if those junior employees are smart.

Also, not everybody can get hired at a FAANG, sometimes because they're good
but not great, sometimes because the FAANG hiring process is terrible, and
sometimes because they don't want to live in SV.

~~~
baron_harkonnen
> $150k+ isn't uncommon for somebody with a few years under their belt.

I don't think that's much higher than government employees make these days. In
DC an engineer "with a few years under their belt" can easily make that at a
startup and be working on much more interesting problems for a much less slimy
company. There are plenty of jobs outside of FAANG that pay that or better.

The parent isn't wrong, at least in my experience, nobody who is technically
competent would take a job at one of those places (and in my experience none
of the technical people coming out of them have been competent).

~~~
angrais
What's with holding Startups up on some pedestole? They can be slimy and most
will fail. Working at a well known consultancy company offers not only
financial security, but additional insurance, and pension benefits that a
startup would not.

It's also not impossible to work in substeams in such a company that mirror
startup processes.

------
maerF0x0
Anecdotally, when I had a stint in consulting I eventually learned that
whenever a client wanted estimates the only way I could get the contract was
to bid about 1/2 of what I knew it would actually take, else one of my
competitors would do the same and they would get it.

These same clients would usually be giving me much praise when we'd eventually
deliver 100% over budget, because that was "much better than their last
contractor"...

A lot of times the buyer isnt even qualified to do that and so the seller has
all the power.

------
robinduckett
I had a recruiter from Deloitte approach me, telling me how great I'd be for
the role they had in mind for me, etc. They wanted a phone interview
immediately. I said fine, I'll go for an interview. Then I got an email
thanking me for my application but my skillset was unsuitable. Except I never
applied for any role, never gave out my CV (although it is out there in the
wild). Absolutely wild. They can't tell their asshole from their elbow.

------
Luechkt
My wife works for a state in a department using software being made by a
company mentioned. The weekly meetings and calls are so astonishingly slow and
deal with such meaningless minutiae that I am sadly not surprised at this
article. Heartbroken a bit, nit not surprised.

------
darepublic
A bit tangential but I recall working with a company that wanted to use a
particular very expensive brand name closed source software framework to build
their ecommerce site. The going price on using this was in the half million
ballpark. Working with this framework I was incredulous that anyone would
actually want to buy this framework -- also none of the sites I have seen
built on this actually work very well. But the force of the brand name and the
audacity of the asking price just seem to mix well I suppose. If you are in a
corporate setting with little technical ability, and more money to spend than
brains, 'you won't get fired' if you choose to go with vendor X (not IBM but
point stands) -- even if vendor X is going to fleece you of millions while
providing little value. Its just the safe thing to do.

~~~
majkinetor
You must be talking about Oracle ADF :)

------
moron4hire
I worked for Deloitte for a year. I'm convinced their business strategy is to
put their worst foot forward first, find the clients that will put up with it,
and then milk them dry.

~~~
simonw
Purely out of interest, what does the tech stack tend to look like for these
big projects?

Do they use open source components and frameworks? Are they using Oracle?

Do they tend to have good test coverage and continuous deployment?

What kind of version control do they use - what kind of branching / release
model etc?

I've been immersed in the GitHub-centric open source world for so long I don't
really have a feel for how these big Deloitte government IT projects work.

~~~
xenihn
Visual Basic and MongoDB on Azure.

~~~
pstuart
What, no /s?

What's sad is that you could be serious and correct.

~~~
TrackerFF
Well, to the defense of VB - it's .NET, so that shouldn't be much of a big
deal these days.

------
saint_abroad
Enterprise software consultancy is a variation of the design price-list
[https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/graphic-design-price-
list...](https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/graphic-design-price-list-charge-
clients/):

$100k Consultancy spec everything

$200k Consultancy spec, provides client with drafts

$300k Consultancy spec, listens to client feedback

$500k Consultancy spec, accepts client changes to requirements

$800k Client spec, accepts consultancy changes to requirements

$1.3M Client spec, listens to consultancy feedback

$2.1M Client spec, provides consultancy with drafts

$3.4M Client spec everything

------
canada_dry
I've been on both sides of the argument and there's plenty of blame to go
around.

On the client side there's the utter lack of clarity, plus in-fighting and
adversarial dynamics between departments and execs.

On the consulting side, it's just too easy to milk all the issues on the
client side. Including playing one side off another - like lawyers in a never
ending divorce settlement.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Clients are never clear. They don't know what they want, need or how to
express it.

I consider it my job to work with them until it becomes clear. I bill them for
that.

If the project fails because of lack lf clairity, it's my fault.

------
mrslave
Internally they're quite honest about what's most important on IT projects:
billable hours.

------
chansiky
For all the people talking about how much BS there is in big consulting, dont
any of you think there could be a business model that could usurp the way the
BS'ing boys club siphons money through narcissism, lies, and incompetence by
replacing them with better quality development for a smaller price tag (but
still with very well paid developers - from the looks of it)?

I'm personally thinking of a team building model where developers can join
together and form teams to bid on projects and win financial rewards for
delivering, reviewing, and passing quality benchmarks, with some sort of
rating system in place to keep bad actors and bs-er's out.

~~~
shaabanban
An immediate problem I see with this is the realistic estimates problem. If
you go to your average deloit/accenture customer and offer them the services
of this anti-BS'ing boys club collective, and then deloit swoops in and says
they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the massive
excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the requirements that
flat out make no sense, then guess who is likely to the win the bid? In the
end it will be your deloits and your Accentures that win and then predictably
the project will run long, not tick every requirement, and end up costing
double.

~~~
chansiky
> says they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the
> massive excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the
> requirements that flat out make no sense

I see your point, thanks for the counter arg, I can't refute this.

It seems the key strategy is to make the payer aware of how much BS they're
paying for... but knowing all the people I know, I know that's just flat out
not going to happen save for a very small percentage of people.

------
moron4hire
While we're shitting on Deloitte:

Between the target billable rate they give you and the amount of time you
spend on regulatory compliance, plus the fact that your own vacation time
counts against your billable rate, you're guaranteed to have to work at least
10 hours of unpaid overtime every week just to hit your target.

I accidentally started a small riot during my introductory training period
when I did the math in my head and blurted it out in the room of 50 other new
people.

The guy running the training left shortly after I got canned, started his own
business, and even sent me some work. He hated that place, too.

------
fzeroracer
Are people surprised by this? This happened also over two years ago during
Hurricane Maria where the contractor failed to supply food to Puerto Rico.

The reality is that all consulting firms are trash. From big to small. They
pay their employees far less than working direct and abuse foreign workers
looking for a good career. They don't care about the product or the people
they work with. I used to work as a contractor and the people I worked with
was fantastic, but what I saw from the larger companies and the way they
treated their work was awful. The incentives are just not aligned properly
because the higher-ups only care about prolonging contracts and siphoning more
money, not about actual quality.

For the government we'd be in a better place if they just hired people
directly rather than going through contracting firms to play telephone and get
a non-working product out of it.

------
my_usernam3
I saw a Vox video recently that hinted that the Government WANTED broken
unemployment systems after showing some of the bugs that existed in their
interface. It infuriated me, because they mentioned Deloitte built it and I
(like others have mentioned in this thread) know they are infamous for bad
software.

It appeared to me Vox wanted to make people mad at some bogus government
conspiracy that a specific state had against it's people. Also that they don't
respect the complexities that go into software development.

Edit so you can get mad at Vox too with me:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ualUPur6iks&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ualUPur6iks&t=1s)

~~~
dsparkman
Florida purposely built a broken system under Governor Rick Scott. It was
engineered to make sure that as few eligible people could access it as
possible. It is socially and technically engineered to make it so that people
give up trying to claim the unemployment benefits they are entitled to.
Florida used the system to keep their unemployment numbers artificially low
coming out 2008 recession.

~~~
ryankupyn
I'd note that while a broken unemployment system would affect statistics on
the number of claims made, the official unemployment rate is calculated
differently, using the Current Population Survey, and doesn't incorporate data
on claims:

[https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm)

~~~
thephyber
The state of Florida cares less about the unemployment rate and more about
whether they have to pay out of their unemployment fund. The federal
government is different because they just increase the deficit whenever the
situation is dire.

------
mi100hael
Biggest question in my mind is why state bureaucrats are given the latitude to
think it's a good idea to build their own one-off solutions. There are 50+
markets for these sorts of systems. It makes absolutely zero sense for them
each to build & maintain their own software products. Of course big consulting
firms are going to _leap_ at the opportunity to bill $50M per state and then
throw together products as cheaply as possible.

States need to start working together on these platforms with in-house
technical teams that can actually own the systems long-term. Or we need to
make it far easier for them to purchase SaaS products like any sane private
market.

~~~
phonon
That's something they've been working on since 2010. See
[http://www.itsc.org/itsc%20public%20library/NationalViewUI_I...](http://www.itsc.org/itsc%20public%20library/NationalViewUI_IT%20Systems.pdf)

And what [http://www.itsc.org/](http://www.itsc.org/) and
[https://www.naswa.org/](https://www.naswa.org/) are supposed to help with.

~~~
mi100hael
NASWA is good at facilitating knowledge-sharing, but they are no better
equipped to build a software product than any state IT department. Each state
is still ultimately handling "modernization" in their own way. There's very
little appetite for COTS for whatever reason, and little sharing of technical
components between states.

~~~
phonon
If a motivated small company wanted to work with NASWA in a "not business as
usual" approach, perhaps with 18F involved, I believe it could be done. Part
of their role is to reduce duplicative efforts across states and try to
establish best practices.

The problem of course is how many small companies are knowledgeable about the
UI IT systems, and can put together a strong proposal? It's a bit chicken and
egg. Yes, NASWA could push this harder if they really wanted to, but it's hard
to manage a consensus oriented organization.

(I was not implying NASWA was going to build things themselves...though if I
were king, I would have them develop an open source UI platform, and then give
it to the states to customize for their individual scenarios. Companies could
compete on how well they make those customizations, and support contracts. Of
course the trend seems to be going in the opposite direction, unfortunately...
c.f. VistA -> Cerner).

------
tomohawk
Yes, there are sharks out there who do poor work. That's why we should expect
the government procurement process to be competent. If the government hires a
shark, the shark is not suddenly going to change. We should be holding the
government responsible for hiring the shark in the first place.

When a government hires a consulting firm to perform a service, the
responsibility does not shift to the firm - it remains with the government.

When procuring the system, did the government provide adequate requirements?
Did they perform proper diligence in selecting the consultant? Did they
provide proper oversight of the work?

The answer is rarely 'yes' to all of these questions.

------
diogenescynic
Deloitte is a horrible consulting company. I worked at a company where someone
senior in my org had a husband who was a partner at Deloitte. We ended up
going from barely using consultants to using them for everything. They even
billed us for our own work and most of the time just ran down the clock on the
contract and left without finishing the project. Pretty sure what our senior
leader was doing was shady and wrong. I ended up leaving and noted this
situation in my exit interview but nothing was ever changed. Conflicts of
interest aren’t taken as seriously as they should be.

------
danielodievich
So I work for an APM vendor. COVID-based unemployment has been excellent for
our public sector sales (as well for other APM vendors who are the
competition). One of the sales people went to (I think) every unemployment
insurance department in every state and pitched them our software. Quite a few
were standing in a smoldering wreckage and they gladly accepted to see what
they could do.

That is how I personally got to look at the guts of unemployment insurance
system of Kansas and Florida back in May.

The KS system was ... well judge for yourself. It was run on 3 (yes that's
three) servers - a 8 CPU 32GB web server hosting UI and IVR web service, a
4CPU 48GB service layer hosting a WCF service talking to mainframe, and some
auxilary 2CPU 4GB server doing some little batch stuff. Yes, that's right, no
redundancy. That's for the state with almost 4 million people. The bottlenecks
were all in the mainframe which was reached by via screenscraping host key-
sending software, which was doing GC.Collect on every end of the given
session. It worked well when nobody was using the unemployment system but once
half the state of KS lost their jobs, everything melted down. The vendor for
the host-key fixed the library by commenting our GC.Collect. Don't know what
happened afterwards.

Then next week I got a look at FL which is the uFacts system built by Deloitte
[https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-
sector/solution...](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public-
sector/solutions/unemployment-insurance-services.html) mentioned in the
article. There was no Deloitte there anymore and from what I can tell there
hasn't been for 3 years. That one was is a standard 3 tier (web layer,
services layer, database layer) hosted by more than enough hardware on web and
services layer - although very much an inconsistent hodgepodge of IaaS
machines from Azure, but it all ended in the big Oracle database that had some
atrocious performance under heavy load. All timeouts were cranked up to the
limit - I am talking WCF/WS timeouts north of 600 seconds, and Oracle DB query
timeouts set to what I think is infinity - so things just backpressured out of
the slow Oracle queries like there is no tomorrow. But optimizations were
pretty obvious. They had an "Messages" table that was adding all the things
that could happen to a case that was north of 100M records and suffered
tremendously on the inserts. Pretty easy sharding or just archiving
opportunity. Here I and couple of my colleagues were able to get to the team
leads and developers in charge to present our findings. Even though the
governor was yelling at them and the lawsuits were filed and people were
struggling, the response back from the dev leads was remarkably devoid of
urgency. "well that we already know about this, we'll hoping to be getting to
this 3 sprints from now". We all shrugged and moved on.

------
chasd00
this article reminds me of the demotivator "Consulting, if you're not part of
the solution there's money to be made prolonging the problem".

------
rexreed
It is the apex of mediocrity to hire the apex of mediocre consulting body
shops that are the so called global systems integrators.

------
neilwilson
It's always worth remembering that large firms like this are not hired for
their ability to deliver products but the free underpants the brand supplies
to the hirer.

It's never about the delivery. It's about the backside covering.

------
unnouinceput
Quote: "Deloitte also faced blowback in 2013 for an unemployment benefits
system it built in Massachusetts. There, the benefits system arrived in 2013,
two years late and $6 million over budget—only to be filled with glitches that
erroneously cut workers’ benefits, according to the Boston Globe."

Ha! I don't think those were glitches, but a clever plan to siphon here and
there a bit of extra money. Kind of "you cut them a small amount of money, you
get some, I get some" deal between state officials and Deloitte. Easy to blame
computers when you do this and have experience. This is a classic case of evil
genius at work.

------
touchpadder
IR35 reform in the UK(every contractor must pay as much taxes as full time
employee and no expenses allowed) is a conspiracy of Deloitte and the
government

~~~
Nextgrid
Source? (neither supporting nor disproving your claim, just genuinely curious
as IR35 is something that could affect me)

------
DeonPenny
Its a government program. Why are people surprised at this point. It literally
always happens. Literally every single time.

------
linuxftw
Alternative title: Incompetent bureaucrats wasted tax payer money, as usual.

There's a saying in the home building industry: "If the boss says put the
toilet on the roof, you put the toilet on the roof." So often in government
contracts, the people writing them are the complete and utter definition of
incompetent.

------
sjg007
Sure... probably by design? And 90% of the work was outsourced.

------
blunte
Who's managing the projects, and where are the workers doing the development?
This story sounds awfully familiar.

------
65536
It’s ironic. In the USA they freak out over the idea that someone might
receive more unemployment than they are entitled to, but they will happily
waste millions of dollars paying someone to do a shitty job.

~~~
jagged-chisel
Tangent: during my last stint on unemployment, there was this class we were
required to attend. In that class, they repeatedly told us that we are not
_entitled_ to unemployment benefits. They didn't exactly offer an alternative
vocabulary.

~~~
c3534l
That's absurd. They take it out of your paycheck every month, it's paid
entirely from employee wages, it can't be spent on anything but unemployment,
and you get benefits proportional to what you contributed. It's literally your
own money that they're giving back to you that they took for the sole purpose
of forcing you to save money for if you lose your job at some point. It's like
if I asked to borrow a pen, then when you asked for it back pretending like it
was some benevolent gift.

~~~
jagged-chisel
It's definitely not a line item on paychecks in my state. It's structured as
an insurance premium paid by companies to the state. The company's premiums
increase when there's a claim against the "policy." Smaller companies like to
try denying claims in an attempt to prevent this increase.

One could certainly argue that if this 'premium' didn't exist, it could be
paid out in salaries.

~~~
c3534l
That's right, I recall something like that. I think states administer their
own unemployment system even though it's mandated by the federal government.
It's a payroll tax where I live. It's calculated based on your wages and paid
based on the amount of insurance you've funded regardless of whether the
regulations/company decides to display it on the calculation or not. It might
also get buried under something like "state and local taxes," too.

------
fractal618
Dog eat dog

------
amINeolib
1 billion dollars later healthcare.gov almost works good.

Sure I need to click the same 14 screens just to get to the Health insurance
options screen, and sure any time I open a URL on page 4 and hit back, it
takes me to the top of page 1....

But government healthcare would surely not run into issues that seem to
trouble every other government service. (Can I post /s or does that delete
your post?)

