Hacker News Reader

Comment by cha5m | Hacker News Reader

Yeah clearly this ui http://elliott.org/wp-content/uploads/IMG_6317.jpg required 10 days to design.

Why would this require more than a few days? Simple UI, then just generate a secure random number and draw an arrow. Bam. Give me 200k.

I mean the largest expense would almost certainly be third-party pen testing and QA. And why would it take a technical writer 5 days to document this? It has 1 function.

View on HN

That's one screenshot, are you prepared to submit a legally binding quote for the project with that little information? Are there more screens? I don't know. Did the client require multiple designs and iterations -- each stamped with the approval of several stake-holders? I don't know.

Judging the final output without any consideration for the process is akin to asking why it took a week to fix that hairy bug. It was only one line of code that changed, how could it possible take you all week to fix it?

Sure, since, in government contracts, "legally binding quote" doesn't mean you actually start losing money or have a judgment issued against you that you're personally liable for if there are time or budget overruns.

You need to be on site with a Secret clearance, a DUNS number, and about three months of paperwork, never mind the cost of the proposal hours to get on the multi award BPA to have the opportunity to win this task order for the work which was 1000 pages and half a year of capture and messaging. The market has a huge cost to enter which makes it sound insane to anyone that's ever posted something to Fiverr

Fair enough. I imagine that the paperwork and app verification is where most of the cost was generated.

Sometimes bureaucratic inefficiency just really gets under my skin.

It is a good and understandable instinct. It is the bane of my existence, which is why I've also devoted a solid chunk of my life to unscrewing it. :)

Don't forget you have to write your arrow direction choices to a database, so that we can prove that over time it was random. And that on August 18th at 10:27, it showed "left" when the person-of-interest (we don't call them suspects anymore) went through the line. This would require a couple of reports be written against the database.

One change may take weeks to sign off on - it's not just one person giving their OK, it's many layers of project/contract managers giving their OK. Each of whom has to account for their time and each of whom has to be paid for that same time.

There are processes that have to be followed, no matter how ridiculous they are, because they exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com