
How a team of young people helped rebuild healthcare.gov - Libertatea
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/?single_page=true
======
caminante
Not to take anything away from the "young people" \-- who are ages 28+ -- but
this article over-sensationalizes their accomplishments.

    
    
      "The MPL team had three great technical accomplishments over its 16-
      month-long life. First, it served as a crack team which understood the
      infrastructure of the site and could resolve small issues as they arose. 
      Second, it built an insurance application, called App2, which signed up 
      new users in less than half the time of the original app. Finally, it 
      replaced the website’s crashy login system with a functional (and much 
      less expensive) one of its own design."
    

I know the author wants a "startup" narrative, but these aren't groundbreaking
accomplishments, let alone the fact #1's silly.

    
    
      "It did most of this while living together in an unremarkable McMansion in suburban 
      Maryland."
    

I don't understand why this matters.

    
    
      "So the team that started by performing bug fixes on a sprawling, struggling mass 
      of code ended by writing critical, efficient infrastructure for the government. 
      Yet what the MPL team accomplished philosophically may be even more important: 
      It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites in 2015."
    

The author tried too hard to overlay a ScrappyStartup™ narrative. This
argument is absurd.

edit: stephengillie called it in his "submarine" comment below (see:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html))

~~~
Mandatum
> It helped teach government bureaucrats how to think about building websites
> in 2015.

I think this is true. Governments and corporate's are starting to see that you
don't need to go with GenericAdAgency12 anymore to get shit-hot, well-made
websites going. This project was a textbook example of this.

------
sabarjp
"Fixing" government web has nothing to do with young people. I contracted for
5 years for the Department of Defense doing full stack web. Yes, most people I
worked with were double my age or more, but many of them are very talented and
eager to implement new technology.

The problem is the massive, unbelievable amount of red tape to get things
done. Software stacks and browsers have to get approval and re-approvals, a
years-long process. Code has to be written in something stable, not something
trendy. The programmers spend more time writing documents and attending
meetings than coding. There are meetings about meetings and the layers of
management are infinitely recursive (managers for the managers).

Start-up culture and tech trends just don't work at the scale of government,
for much the same reasons massive corporations move glacially. Just add even
more layers of management, congress, civil service employees that cannot be
fired, and tax dollars to the mix.

I enjoyed my time working in government web, but "youth" isn't really an
answer.

~~~
wpietri
Speaking as an old, I think youth is part of the answer. One of the things I
have to really work at as I get older is unlearning the things that used to be
true. Given the pace of technological change, younger people have an advantage
in that they have less to unlearn.

> Start-up culture and tech trends just don't work at the scale of government,
> for much the same reasons massive corporations move glacially.

This is good example of an old truth that needs some unlearning. Old
corporations move glacially. Some new ones work differently, though.

Government can also work differently. The folks at 18F and the US Digital
Service are demonstrating that in ways both large and small. Indeed, when I
was looking at a USDS job, a White House advisor told me plainly that agile,
iterative approaches were _clearly better_ for government because they were
much more effective at risk reduction than producing piles of documents ever
could be.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Government can also work differently. The folks at 18F and the US Digital
> Service are demonstrating that in ways both large and small. Indeed, when I
> was looking at a USDS job, a White House advisor told me plainly that agile,
> iterative approaches were clearly better for government because they were
> much more effective at risk reduction than producing piles of documents ever
> could be.

Is there a reason you didn't take the USDS job?

------
batoure
I applaud the accomplishments of these people. But I don't like the narrative
because it is misleading. Lets change context with a nice metaphor and reframe
the discussion...

"how a team of immigrants helped bring in a strawberry harvest"

The success of this team is based on a relationship between two things: 1)
eagerness to prove one self 2) willingness to suffer pain in order to prove
one self

Having worked with a number of them, my experience has been that building
things from scratch in big bureaucracies (that aren't software companies) is
basically impossible. To much group think inevitably destroys the scoping
process.

The teams that have impressed me in big bureaucracies tend to operate in the
following manner: -take/buy something off the shelf that meets 60% of the
requirements -use a team of seasoned project managers and engineers who have
seen the darkest gloomiest bloodiest field of battle to incrementally patch
and beat that software into the inflexible mold of their bureaucracy

This strategy usually works surprisingly well, but it is like comparing
steering a slow moving container ship to a speed boat. It's part of the reason
that the agile SaaS market is so successful and profitable.

I first went to work with an organization where a planning meeting was
discussing a new feature. Because of my startup culture experience I asked a
PM after the meeting "this sounds cool should I whip up a prototype tonight".
The project manager laughed and said "this feature set is on the roadmap for
2014 (two years out at the time), we wanted your input but you should be
focusing on your existing ticket pipeline". When you consider the scope of the
organization the things that they were doing with their core platform was
pretty incredible.

That being said it drove me personally nuts, and I quit.

------
spiritplumber
As usual, a fix-it team does 80% of the work in 20% of the time for 5% of the
money.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think often fix-it-teams are allowed to do things the regulars are not
allowed to do. I have seen several projects where pretty much everybody
(except maybe the top managers) knew what's wrong but wasn't allowed to make
changes.

Then some crack team (Accenture or "young people") comes in, gets permission
to make the necessary changes and gets all the credit.

------
orf
Is there any more information about the inner workings of the failed
healthcare.gov site? It's quite interesting to read how horribly wrong they
got it.

~~~
stephengillie
This has to be the 10th submarine piece I've seen about healthcare.gov.

~~~
orf
They all seem to be light on the technical reasons though.

------
camel_gopher
"The old system responded to requests somewhere between two and 10 long
seconds; the new one takes 30 milliseconds, on average."

Wow, 30 milliseconds. Subtract out the RTT, and you have app request times on
the order of 5ms. Outstanding. And impossible.

~~~
ChuckMcM
When Blekko was serving web traffic if it came from the primary index and was
cached (a repeat request) it was served up in under a millisecond. I learned
at Google to never under estimate what sort of performance you could get
reading the result out of the memory of a nearby computer. 10,000 computers
with 96GB each on them can easily keep 640TB of data ready to return very very
quickly. Its even faster if you have your own zero copy TCP/IP layer (right
from client memory into the network interface card).

For an example of scale, 10,000 nodes with 96GB each costs less than $30M
dollars. The government spent billions on the healthcare.gov project.

------
nolepointer
So progressive!

------
dominotw
ugh. Youth worship again. fuck these people.

~~~
vonmoltke
Not just youth worship, youth genius worship.

Having been subjected to the government's definition of "agile" before[1], I
can tell you that nearly everyone who was at least barely competent
technically[2] thought the processes were asinine. The problem is that nobody
could convince the government customers and non-technical management of this.
The government in particular was bad, as their reps (GS and contractor) often
came in with a dictatorial, know-it-all attitude about the problems they were
hiring us to solve.

This team managed to do what they did because they were outsiders brought in
specifically to fix a high-profile fuck-up. I'm willing to bet that most of
what they did was suggested at some point by people who worked on the broken
system, but it was shot down. The success of the second effort was primarily
political.

[1] The Gantt chart bit brought back memories that made me want to throw
things.

[2] Despite stereotypes to the contrary, most developers and engineers working
at government contractors are at least barely competent. Contractors with
mature engineering orgs (Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, etc) are better as they
tend to force the fuck-ups out pretty quickly.

~~~
wpietri
> This team managed to do what they did because they were outsiders brought in
> specifically to fix a high-profile fuck-up.

This is true. But having recently talked with a number of people at 18F and
the USDS, I think the enormous scale of the high-profile fuckup is serving as
a great example to persuade people that things should be done differently.

For example, note that the government is trying to change the purchasing
processes that drive heavyweight methods and delivery of monoliths:

[https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/01/08/creating-a-federal-
marketplac...](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/01/08/creating-a-federal-marketplace-
for-agile-delivery-services/)

~~~
vonmoltke
The government is really making strides to improve technical acquisition, and
acquisition in general. The original healthcare.gov semms to have been a wake-
up call that will permanently stick and improve government service delivery. I
would actually like to do a tour at some point, but I don't think they would
take me.

Having said that, there is one three-letter monolith that commands the
plurality of the Federal budget and shows absolutely no inclinations to
change. They have resisted intrusion by USDS and 18F thus far, and I can tell
you from direct experience that their information systems and policies are
atrocious. Hopefully 18F, USDS, and similar efforts can eventually penetrate
the Five-Sided Playpen, but it is going to be a long, hard slog.

------
rebootthesystem
I love healthcare.gov.

For the first time in decades the entire country experienced exactly the
government they elected and are paying for. And the beauty of it is that it
could not be hidden away, spun or silenced.

What's sad is to see an article such as this one pushing the idea that it was
fixed...a "Mission Accomplished" message of sorts. The truth of the matter is
that dozens of people should have been fired and a number of them should have
ended-up in jail.

Nothing has been fixed. Sure, the website is better but the organization is
still being run by he same incompetent morons who created the problem in the
first place. That's the problem. And, yes, a bunch of young people can help
fix it without writing a line of code by using their brains to vote rather
than cargo cult and emotion.

