
Google, Oracle Workers Enlisted for Obamacare 'Tech Surge' - smaili
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-31/google-oracle-workers-enlisted-for-obamacare-tech-surge-.html
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MrZongle2
If I just learned that a government spent time and resources to tap my fiber-
optic network and record the internal operations of my company, I'd be
_damned_ if I would then lend said government some of my prized technicians to
pull their asses out of a fire of their own making.

But that's just me.

I wonder what the end-result of this "surge" will be, besides the obvious (a
website that is declared "working" whether or not the processes behind it
are): will we start to hear horror stories of the mess behind the scenes of
healthcare.gov, after _real_ professionals get to see the sausage factory in
operation?

~~~
tptacek
The idea that someone would refuse to help get more people insured in a
country where health care financing will for at least the next 10 years depend
entirely on insurance because of something the NSA did is emblematic of how
annoying nerds like us are when it comes to public policy.

That'll show 'em! All 10-15 people in the government who might get fired over
Obamacare, along with the 10 MILLION people who will spend even more time
uninsured. You get 'em!

~~~
revelation
So it's perfectly okay for the government to play the "enemy of my enemy is my
friend" and other nonsense games, but here it is "emblematic of how annoying
nerds like us are when it comes to public policy"?

I also really don't think a goddamn website stands in the way of affordable
universal health care. Implement a Weberian bureaucracy and have it run on
good old paper and mail, that is how its done everywhere else, and by the
looks of this IT disaster we'd come out on top, jobs and everything!

~~~
magicalist
Are you going to be paying taxes this year? I don't know who people think pays
for the NSA, but its the money we pay in taxes every year.

I encourage all americans on here who will owe taxes for 2013 to take a stand
and stop paying taxes until the FISC is dissolved as a matter of principle.

It's ridiculous the number of HN members ready to cast the first stone because
they judge _someone else 's_ leverage to be sufficient that _they_ should be
taking a stand. It's the exact same phenomenon that gives us zero approval for
congress yet astronomical rates of incumbency every election.

If you aren't willing to withhold tax payments, clearly you at least recognize
there is _some_ line at which you can actively support a government that is
engaged in something very wrong because the benefit of not doing so would be
tiny compared to the harm. Now imagine that instead of funding a tiny, tiny
portion of the government, your support would instead be helping millions of
people to find insurance coverage.

\- We cannot allow our rights to be ignored.

\- There are millions of people forgoing medical treatment every day because
they don't have insurance.

\- There are thousands of people going into personal bankruptcy every day
because they don't have insurance.

Luckily we can work on fixing more than one thing at once. The idea that we
should ignore one until the other is fixed is ludicrous, and I would argue a
net immoral act if put into practice.

~~~
dnautics
_> If you aren't willing to withhold tax payments, clearly you at least
recognize there is some line at which you can actively support a government
that is engaged in something very wrong because the benefit of not doing so
would be tiny compared to the harm._

You don't think that someone might be unwilling to break the law for a cause
because prison isn't such a nice place?

~~~
jl6
You could always defund the government by giving your taxable income to
charity. But I expect most people think they deserve their income more than
the government doesn't deserve it.

~~~
dnautics
it's not just a matter of desserts. Unlike corporations, which are taxed on a
_profit_ basis (i.e. income less costs), individuals are taxed on an _income_
basis. So if you give 100% of your income to charity, there is nothing left
for food, shelter, etc.

~~~
jl6
Don't give 100% away, just give the taxable part away. Don't most countries
have a personal tax-free allowance?

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penguindev
"Adding more workers to a late software project makes it later"

see the Mythical Man Month.

I wonder if there's an additional scaling factor for gigantic government
cluster fucks.

Yep, obamacare is doing nothing to provide more doctors.. just more
computerized bureaucracy to boost IT salaries. But I hope we all know the
government doesn't give a fuck about your health, or privacy....

~~~
meowface
True, but replacing (potentially) incompetent workers with very competent
workers will probably help, as long as they're allowed autonomy.

~~~
deelowe
Actually, no. Again, read the book. It doesn't work that way. The more
competent workers will want to rewrite everything setting the whole project
back. Many times, staying with the incompetent crew is better even if it means
things move slow as molasses and the final product is buggy as hell.

~~~
nknighthb
> _The more competent workers will want to rewrite everything_

That's at odds with describing them as "competent".

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MysticFear
Not exactly, what if the existing code/architecture has inherit security flaws
in a high value Healthcare system? Something that competent workers won't just
let exist to "finish" the job.

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nknighthb
I continue to believe you do not understand what a competent developer is. A
competent developer will do what is necessary to accomplish the job they are
given, in this case making an already-launched service work as quickly as
possible. That may include unfortunate workarounds for security issues pending
a real fix.

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sesteel
I can see the Fox News headlines already. "Not even the nation's best tech
companies could save Obamacare."

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zaroth
Fully open source the pricing tables, and we can do the rest in a matter of
days.

Nothing the 'data hub' is doing is actually necessary to "help" the American
people price out an insurance policy, and decide if they want to buy it or pay
the "fee" instead. I think the allure of feasting on all that Big Data and
tying all their systems together for more efficient error correction, de-
duping, and mining for "other purposes" was too much to resist.

thetylerhayes mentioned
[http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/insurance_plans?zip_code=3670...](http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/insurance_plans?zip_code=36701)
which is a good example of what's easily possible. It's not much more work to
_ask_ for household income, birthdates, and tobacco use, and calculate the
exact cost.

It's trivial to take a given household income and show the resulting subsidy.
Personally I think checking for Medicaid eligibility is out of scope, but it's
not black magic either, just the questions you would have to ask would vary
per state.

If they would open source the APIs and schemas for submitting completed
applications to the insurance companies, then starting from scratch a team of
5 could have the whole system online before Thanksgiving.

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DanielBMarkham
The more this drama unfolds, the more I think it's going to make for a great
book for nerds. A big-ticket IT project, behind on schedule, lots of political
flak, all the usual dysfunctional behaviors that happen with off-the-rails
projects, the VP just called us all geeks, now Oracle and Google are
parachuting in "alpha teams"

Sounds like something out of a Tom Clancy book for liberal nerds. Big
Government program on the rocks. Select team comes in and saves the day. Hell,
might even be a movie in there somewhere.

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Segmentation
This is really smart of Google and Oracle. By lending their engineers over to
Healthcare.gov, their engineers are going to get the best healthcare systems
training possible. It's the best domain knowledge enhancement program
available. Healthcare.gov is attempting something no other start up in the
nation has the opportunity or capacity of accomplishing, because of the sheer
scope of it.

If I worked in a healthcare start up I would be making every effort to get
contracted.

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thetylerhayes
> Healthcare.gov is attempting something no other start up in the nation has
> the opportunity or capacity of accomplishing, because of the sheer scope of
> it.

Opportunity? Indeed, no.

Capacity? Oh my yes. Just look at what @MMWasser was able to build in the few
days since healthcare.gov's launch based on healthcare.gov's and related
sites' data:
[http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/](http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/)

Plenty of talented engineers are just waiting to pounce on any and all data
and opportunity made available to revolutionize this space. There's more than
enough capacity.

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tunesmith
Anyone know how to get in on that? :) Being a senior level enterprise java
developer in the health care sphere, I'd be interested in helping out.

~~~
sjg007
I imagine Obama calls you. Most of these guys may have been on his re-election
engineering team.

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vincie
The "tech Surge" will be no doubt meet resistance by the "Talebug" terrorists.
This war will not be won in our lifetime (or the lifetime of this thread at
any rate).

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Zenst
Ok so we have a buggy website and this is going too be fixed by using
outsourced engineers. Not exactly a solution and for all we know Oracle could
send the same engineers that made mistakes in java, not impossible.

Just so long as the website does not start insisting upon a toolbar to be
installed, then nobody will get any more upset pressing F5 repeatedly to check
if the site is down. If anything this website is suffering a bit from what I
call fashion denial of service, bit of a fotm.

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outside1234
More engineers make a project later. So this is bad news.

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DigitalSea
"Hey, uh, Google... We are sorry we secretly stole information from your
personal networks and spied on you and your users activities. Can you be good
pals and help us get our site working?" — what a joke. If only Obama dedicated
as many resources as he does to his spying programs, then the site might have
made its deadline flawlessly.

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vxNsr
Anything about too many cooks in the kitchen?

I'm just wondering how they can so straightfacedly say that it will take one
month to fix what is clearly not an easy problem...

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barista
What platforms is it hosted on? Did that have anything to do with who is
helping out?

~~~
VladRussian2
i'd speculate that Google is brought in because it is good PR, and Oracle,
well, it sounds like healthcare.gov backend is running something like 4-6 node
RAC (most probably Exadata). Good luck to them as they would really need it :)

~~~
nostrademons
Google SREs have a lot of experience managing very complex systems with very
little downtime. There're certain architectural patterns and practices you can
use if you want to keep a large distributed website highly-available.

Oracle I'd imagine is there for expertise with specific technologies.

Also, it's worth remembering that these are specific _engineers_ who
volunteered, and not their employers. So a lot is really who was willing to do
it.

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ninjac0der
At what point do we stop handing over ideas to the spaz for implementation?

