

Ask HN: Thoughts on what's plaguing the Obamacare site? - jtemplin


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hga
The government took way too long to get started "bending metal", it had the
inexperienced/no experience on this scale HHS Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services government bureaucrats be the integrator for this 50+?
contractor effort, per the NYT " _In the last 10 months alone, government
documents show, officials modified hardware and software requirements for the
exchange seven times._ "
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583327)),
those changes continued through the last week before the launch, and full
testing obviously was delayed until that last week. Underlying their
inexperience, evidently CMMS didn't see a need for bottleneck monitors, given
that we've heard of them being put in place post-launch.

And refused to listen to the people waving red flags started no later than
spring of this year, when one of these bureaucrats changed his goal/desire
from a "First World" website to one that wasn't "Third World"....

So the customer completely screwed up, including launching when the techies
told them it couldn't possibly work. Add to that the usual inefficiencies of
contracting, plus government contracting, I can't see how this project ever
had the slightest chance of success. Especially with them now talking about a
" _tech 'surge'_", obviously no one in authority has even bothered to read
_The Mythical Man Month_ "; I just don't see these people as being used to the
hard constraints of the real world.

Subsequently, as related in that NYT article, CMMS appears to be quietly
panicking (we've heard that independently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572467)),
and maybe not so quietly when per the NYT article they proposed 3 days after
launch to through away the current identity system. Per that article, they
have been consumed with working with the White House and hopes to have a plan
for the contractors ready by Thursday; decisiveness is not part of their
vocabulary.

So as things stand now, I wouldn't expect anything really working in 2014. I
expect serious changes as this drags on for months, who know knows about 2014,
but as for now....

