After alleged 'bait and switch,' Nevada DMV cancels $78M IT contract | Hacker News Reader

After alleged 'bait and switch,' Nevada DMV cancels $78M IT contract

statescoop.com

120 pointsus0r114 comments

Audit: http://budget.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/budgetnvgov/content/IAudi...

This one is extra bad. Not even a communication plan? They did manage to spend $13 MILLION on Oracle shit though. The best part is the solution they sold, which is not even working in New Hampshire, and was built on DynamicsCRM (not portable to oracle)

The grand finale:

"The contract was amended in February 2017, which extended the termination date for an additional year for maintenance coverage. It also increased the maximum amount of the contract by $3 million, primarily for additional hardware and software."

That person needs to be fired immediately and probably arrested.

> This one is extra bad. Not even a communication plan? They did manage to spend $13 MILLION on Oracle shit though. The best part is the solution they sold, which is not even working in New Hampshire, and was built on DynamicsCRM (not portable to oracle)... That person needs to be fired immediately and probably arrested.

To be honest, as someone who lives in New York, that doesn't even sound that bad, as far as corruption in government contract goes.

To give you an idea, the MTA was recently caught paying $200,000 per day to people who literally did not have any jobs to do[0]. They were able to cover this up for years, and when it was finally made public, nobody batted an eyelid because, well, this level of corruption and wasteful spending is so commonplace that nobody was surprised in the least.

Hopefully Nevada has a functioning democratic government (unlike New York) and the state government decides to hold these people accountable. It's been over a month since that NYTimes piece came out, and Governor Cuomo hasn't even felt the need to respond to it - that's how little accountability our elected officials here have.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

From your link:

> The labor deals negotiated between the unions and construction companies also ensure that workers are well paid. The agreement for Local 147, the union for the famed “sandhogs” who dig the tunnels, includes a pay rate for most members of $111 per hour in salary and benefits. The pay doubles for overtime or Sunday work, which is common in transit construction. Weekend overtime pays quadruple — more than $400 per hour.

Wow. Seems like programming isn't a good field if you're in it for the money. The base pay may not be far off if you're a big shot superstar in a small market or normal in SV, but which of us gets 4x salary for weekend hours?

I am sure the workers wouldn't see much of this overtime pay as the TM would have just billed NV DMV at that rate.

That's because we've outsourced enforcing government's accountability to The People...to government.

See the problem?

What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption? E.g. promoting a constitutional amendment against conflict-of-interest or corruption. The closest I can think of is The Rootstrikers campaign, started by Lawrence Lessig:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers

Represent.Us and this weekend the big UnrigTheSystem conference in Louisiana.

Represent.Us has been focusing on passing state level anticorruption acts until we fix congress enough to pass federal ones. To show just how corrupt things are, they got one passed in South Dakota and the powers turned around and did this https://www.salon.com/2017/01/25/south-dakota-republicans-st...

Personally I have spent a long time thinking about these issues and I think at the federal level both parties are so corrupt that my 2020 campaign will be based on taking the majority away from both parties, and uniting independents, libertarians, constitutionalists, the green, and other parties under a coalition dedicated to actually representing their constituents.

> What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption? E.g. promoting a constitutional amendment against conflict-of-interest or corruption. The closest I can think of is The Rootstrikers campaign, started by Lawrence Les

New York doesn't have ballot initiatives like some states do. Constitutional amendments have to be proposed by the legislature, and they're going to be pretty unlikely to vote to take away their own power.

> What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption?

In the not-so-distant past, there was a pretty successful initiative where people would occasionally end the lives of people who blatantly stole from them, or egregiously misrepresented them, while holding a position in representative government.

Can you elaborate on this? I don't follow.

One of the root causes of New York's government dysfunction (though not the only one) is that New Yorkers reliably vote in the democrat candidate regardless of pretty much any other consideration. It's what in the UK would be called a "safe seat".

Politicians in safe seats are theoretically accountable but due to the partisan nature of the electorate can in reality do whatever they like. Regardless of how badly they perform, they or their allies will always get re-elected.

In the UK there are some seats like that and they're usually associated with the most hilariously incompetent politicians. Diane Abbott became famous in the last couple of years for all sorts of useless and bad behaviour, like this famous exchange in which she went on the radio to explain a new policy of hiring more police, but repeatedly gave nonsensical and inconsistent numbers for how many and how much it'd cost:

http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/diane-abb...

e.g. she claimed hiring 10,000 police would cost only 300,000 pounds and when it was pointed out that'd mean paying them 30 pounds a year, she just invented another number on the spot that was also an order of magnitude away from anything that could possibly be correct.

She also routinely posts racist and sexist stuff on Twitter, skips important votes and generally fails at basic politics but her share of the vote went up in the election - because she's Labour.

No competition? No accountability!

> One of the root causes of New York's government dysfunction (though not the only one) is that New Yorkers reliably vote in the democrat candidate regardless of pretty much any other consideration.

Er, what? That's not really true. Bloomberg was an independent and his predecessor was Giuliani.

Over the last 40 years, the mayor has been a democrat less than half the time (18 years over Koch, Dinkins, and now de Blasio).

We're talking about New York State, not New York City.

GP isn't quite right that New York is a single-party state, but he is right that most districts aren't at all competitive. There are certain districts that are deemed Democratic territory and others that are Republican territory, and the two parties have gentleman's agreements with each other not to compete in each other's turf.

> We're talking about New York State, not New York City.

That's pretty hard to infer given the context, since the MTA is controlled by both the city and the state.

> but he is right that most districts aren't at all competitive

This is also true of say, Georgia. You can see for example that no one even ran against Buddy Carter in 2016 [1]. Most districts, period, aren't really that competitive.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_1st_congressional_...

> That's pretty hard to infer given the context, since the MTA is controlled by both the city and the state.

Not really - the MTA is a private entity which receives the bulk of its funding from the state, and the state government is (ostensibly) responsible for holding it accountable.

> This is also true of say, Georgia. You can see for example that no one even ran against Buddy Carter in 2016 [1]. Most districts, period, aren't really that competitive.

New York is a special case in the degree to which both parties collude to keep districts non-competitive for general elections, how they ensure that even primary elections are non-competitive[0], and the number of state laws that they have passed in order to shield this power from being checked by voters at any step.

I don't really want to get too into the details here, because it's tangential to the original topic, but it's been discussed on HN before.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-poli...

> the MTA is a private entity which receives the bulk of its funding from the state

That's not really true. The biggest source of funding for the MTA is fares, followed closely by dedicated taxes (i.e. there would be no reason for the taxes to exist were it not specifically for the MTA). A majority of those taxes are levied specifically on people who live in the MTA's core area (basically counties surrounding and including the city) [1].

The state actually dips into these dedicated taxes to cover other budget shortfalls.

You make it sound as though the state covers for the MTA using the general tax pool, which is such a minor part of the MTA's budget (through subsidies largely) as to be not meaningful.

> the state government is (ostensibly) responsible for holding it accountable.

No, the board is. The governor appoints 6 board members, the city 4, and the other 7 are delegates from various counties throughout the state.

> New York is a special case

Special case according to whom? Georgia rated 3rd-to-last on Ballotpedia's "competitiveness index" for the 2016 election cycle [2]. If your argument is that:

1) New York overtly colludes to remain uncompetitive

2) Georgia doesn't

3) George still manages to hold less competitive elections than New York

then I think a logical conclusion is one of:

1) Georgia legislators collude but less overtly

2) There's less transparency about the collusion in Georgia

3) Collusion clearly isn't as large a factor in uncompetitive elections as other factors

1: http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-funding

2: https://ballotpedia.org/2016_state_legislative_elections_ana...

Having lived in both states here's my perspective:

NY has long been a NYC/everything else split. As home prices rose and blue collar workers got priced out of LI, it too is lumping in with NYC as a Dem block. Between the two they way outvote in statewide elections.

Upstate is mainly Repub with a few blue areas.

GA was Dem for years until the mid-90's. Even the Dems were fairly conservative (remember Zell Miller's "My party left me" comments) and since taking control of statewide and anything other than ATL and Macon proper they have gerrymandered districts to the point of there is no way the Democrats could take back either of the legislative bodies.

TL;DL NY has been like this a long time. Albany has played the game for centuries. GA is just learning.

That's not how state government works though. Representatives are not businesses that can steal customers. They each have interests they wish to serve. If people are electing the people they want and those people are doing what they are elected to do then democracy is working. How have we outsourced accountability any more than we intended to in the first place with representative democracy?

> If people are electing the people they want and those people are doing what they are elected to do then democracy is working.

New York election law has been engineered to the point where it's actually impossible for voters to have any influence on the outcome. (That's why New York perennially has the lowest election turnout in the country).

Even our primary elections are essentially coronations for the candidates that the parties themselves hand-pick[0], with no real way for voters to override that choice. That's just one law, and if it were only that one, it might not be such a problem, but it's part of a carefully-constructed system that leaves New York residents with truly no control over our government.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-poli...

> it's part of a carefully-constructed system that leaves New York residents with truly no control over our government.

That’s an extraordinary claim. You’re essentially arguing that democracy has failed in New York and that there was some conspiracy to undermine it.

I only skimmed but your linked article seems to focus on filling vacancies in the middle of a term.

Has NY done anything to prevent candidates from getting on the ballot in regular elections?

Unsurprisingly, the work was outsourced to an Indian company, "Tech Mahindra".

Nothing against Indians as a people, but Indian outsourcing companies are known for the terrible product quality.

I just don't understand why public works should ever go outside of the local economy, globalisation or not. I don't just want my tax dollars to give me a new thing, I want that new thing to be built in my state. If we don't have the skillset then let that money stimulate growth there.

Recently our government outsourced some naval ship building outside the country at the last moment after having expressed they were going to have them locally built. The reason for the switch was cost. To shave a million or two off the price of a many hundred million dollar project they decided to completely remove our local economy from the benefactors.

Private projects? Do what you like. Global times. But a governments role is to grow the economy and welfare of its people, public works are excellent ways to stimulate that.

Or local universities[1]. I think they had their then current staff train their replacements --what gall.

Now, imagine if the faculty president thought "hmm, I bet we can save a bunch if we do remote teaching. We'll get super large interactive displays in every classroom and we'll have faculty in [some country] teach our students. We'll save millions!"

[1]http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/UCSF-to-outsource...

Anyone who's ever seen a University budget can see why they'd never do that.

Slippery slope, if you outsource/fully digitize the teachers...administration comes next.

The easy work around is to open a "local" office or wholly owned subsidiary that they run the contract through. It happens all the time with "minority-owned, female led small businesses" to win government contracts.

All the Beltway Bandits (DC consulting companies) know how to play the game, to what degree they play it is the only question. It's unfortunate that they game the system but the rules are set up to encourage it.

The argument is that picking the most efficient solution regardless of where it is sourced from is actually the best way to increase the welfare of your local {economy,state,nation}. Trying to artificially prop up the local economy seems attractive in the short term, but ultimately leads to inefficiency and exactly the excesses the NYT post above cites in the context of metro construction.

For a longer argument, see Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations).

If we don't have the skillset then let that money stimulate growth there.

For one-off projects, all you're doing is spending a bunch of money training people, who will then mostly likely move to places where there are long-term jobs.

Investing in the creation of new industries might be a good endeavor for a government, but it should be dictated by a strategy, not by its occasional needs.

Australia?

We also have a local train manufacturing industry. But end up buying from China...

The UK is the leader in this field sadly. One of the very few things we are still “good” at is destroying our own economy for short term gain.

Hardly. Crossrail is the largest construction project in Europe and most contracts went to UK firms, most staff were trained on-site in the UK at a specially built tunnelling academy and so on.

Well that’s a step in the right direction but look at all the public sector IT work going to outsourcing companies who promptly offshore it.

Can you be more specific? I'm sure it happens a lot, but if the product is delivered successfully then no problem, right? UK unemployment is very low despite massive uncontrolled immigration from very tech savvy populations, so there's not exactly large pools of unemployed domestic software engineers for governments to tap.

"Contractor Did Not Provide Personnel Proficient in English DMV represents the contractor is not meeting the RFP requirements for proficient communication. In the RFP response, the contractor represented all project personnel will be proficient in communicating, speaking, and reading English. DMV had to edit project documentation and meeting minutes provided by the contractor for grammar and spelling because they were not written in a clear manner and were not useable. Consequently, required project documentation and meeting minutes have not been completed timely. "

This tells me everything. In my experience nothing turns a project into a slow moving trainwreck more quickly than poor communication. The ambiguity and confusion it creates saps all morale and clarity of purpose out of everyone.

"completed timely," itself strikes me as not great English.

The adverbial use is not so unusual: http://www.adamsdrafting.com/basis/

My problem is the tax payer is paying $195 an hour and the Indian guy is maybe getting $5? Nevermind the tax payer getting ripped off, it just seems wrong.

Also totally a waste practically because you get no product.

The question you should ask is why wasn't the contract given to an American software company ?

Who can even imagine the levels of incompetence in this.

EDIT: NV always responds really fast to info requests but this one is taking a while. I specifically asked for reference letters with everything else. Who ever filled in the info on the BOE meeting clearly lied. They've had a contract with another state and my guess is unhealthy.

http://purchasing.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/purchasingnvgov/conte...

They want something "cloud ready" yet acquired $600,000 of Oracle cloud licenses (what ever that is)?

"The Department purchased and received Oracle hardware, Oracle Software, Network and security Hardware and Software, and the Oracle Cloud Software. The hardware is located in both the Department's Carson City and Las Vegas (Flamingo) server rooms. To-date, the purchase cost for hardware and software is $11,408,412.

The cost breakdown is as follows: 1. Oracle Hardware - $3,000,000 2. Oracle Software - $5,900,000 3. Oracle Cloud Subscription - $618,000 4. Security-Network software and hardware - $1,890,412

Total Costs $11,408,412"

http://budget.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/budgetnvgov/content/Meeti...

Page 262. "This is a new contract to provide, design and implement a new system to replace the existing and aging client server application. The modernization of the current system will provide better customer service, reduce transaction processing time, increase speed-to-market of NV DMV products and services, enhance security and reduce system backlog"

Very clever choice of words. I'll bet the board who approved that contract didn't know they signed a contract for nothing.

From their own site:

https://www.techmahindra.com/media/press_releases/TechMahind...

"The solution will be migrated to the Oracle technology stack"

So they are going to migrate 4 years worth of Dynamics customizations (which aren't even working) to the Oracle technology stack. Right. No shit they didn't even show up.

> They want something "cloud ready" yet acquired $600,000 of Oracle cloud licenses (what ever that is)?

Chatting with a former coworker and apparently Oracle has their own (dysfunctional) cloud offering these days.

They have been using some ugly tactics to market it too:

http://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-customer-explains-audi...

Quote from the article:

Oracle has been threatening customers with big bills for software they're using but it says they haven't properly paid for, Craig Guarente, CEO of Oracle asset-management consultant Palisade Compliance, previously told Business Insider.

Then Oracle makes the threat go away if the customer buys credits for cloud services, according to the consultant's description of the tactic.

They even have a fleet of branded cars they drive around competitor's events to promote themselves: https://twitter.com/Oracle/status/935647345823309830

They promise to cut your Amazon bill in half. I guess they have scissors.

> Chatting with a former coworker and apparently Oracle has their own (dysfunctional) cloud offering these days.

I think that's right. I keep getting emails from Oracle sales claiming they are going to save me tons of money if I move my cloud to workload to them. When has Oracle ever saved someone money?

Yes indeed. I know a couple of Oracle salespeople, and they appear to be pushing it hard - they were giving insane incentive bonuses for selling cloud subscription signups until recently. Not sure that they're really making inroads though.

Is this decision so bad that it’s highlighting a potential red flag for a bribe between Oracle and managers of this company? « Probable cause » warrant investigations in other areas, wondering about this one.

Personally I have no doubt someone has a job offer at oracle or two people are exchanging envelopes. If the vendor suggested Oracle maybe not but since it was someone at the DMV, 100%. I'm about 90% sure Oracle isn't even fully implemented in any DMV.

Well done sleuthing!

It's kinda crazy how much money gets thrown around by an org you wouldn't think twice about. If a group of engineers from HN got together and secured a deal like that, they could easily retire with that kind of money.

Never underestimate the complexity of those projects: I’d bet that the requirements would fill a bookshelf, and simply navigating the hurdles to bid & convince them that you have the resources to deliver would rule out a group of engineers below the triple digit range.

(Yes, that’s not a good way to build things successfully. Welcome to enterprise IT.)

In theory the requirements fill a bookshelf in practice nobody checks them that closely outside of fairly basic automated tests for things like 508 compliance.

This is both untrue – maybe they don’t check 100% but everyone who put something on that list is going to notice if you leave their needs unmet – and it doesn’t matter unless you know which things won’t be checked. Otherwise you have liability for not delivering, which probably means you take on the same level of complexity as requested even if much of that effort is wasted or counterproductive.

It's true that a range of stakeholders care about different things, but the solution is to demo the project regularly to verify it fit's basic needs and covers everyone's pet issue.

Gov software projects are on a pass fail scale, and people have minimal expectations despite what they may hope to see. The waterfall approach of gather a bunch of details > build something is more about budget than a black and white must meet 100% of every specific req.

The problem is when people are restricted by policy or law from not using waterfall. So many bad government outcomes are caused by attempts to prevent a past mistake on a different kind of project and changing those policies is harder than trying to muddle through any one project.

The problem is when people are restricted by policy or law from not using waterfall. So many bad government outcomes are caused by attempts to prevent a past mistake on a different kind of project.

Also the companies aren't geared up to even know what they want so they can't even explain the complexities or even comprehend what needs doing. I have literally seen a multi-million pound project on the requirements "take our app that works and make a new one that looks like facebook", unsurprisingly it failed completely and didn't meet the requirements which were basically made up on the fly as bugs were raised.

They might not even have solid requirements. Or they change from week-to-week. And/or the people writing them don't have enough knowledge to essentially be the PMs for the project.

We'd have to work a lot on our golf game to secure that kind of contract.

Prior version of the system used PowerBuilder. That figures.

My fly-by of PowerBuilder 20 years ago made a deep impression. Like, I never wanted to even think about that hunk of garbage again. It's right up there with PeopleSoft. If you're ever offered an opportunity to work with these systems, just run away.

The state didn't know how to buy or develop software then, and it doesn't know how to buy or develop software today.

Experienced developers know that a mess can be made in any platform.

One issue with a position and maligning statement like the above against any platform is that it actually enables said charlatans to charge way more for a sub standard developer base who end up being over paid, because skilled developers are not as readily available to fix, and ideally refactor the system.

Hardest of all to imagine is systems that have had legitimately tens of millions of dollars of mission critical and hardened infrastructure that manage more complexity than many of us will ever handle.. are written in platforms like Powerbuilder.

I have personally never used Powerbuilder. I know some ace developers who spent a lot of time (among other things) using Powerbuilder and they have said it's like any other language or framework - lots of messes, some good stuff too.

Still, I won't ever stop noticing the kinds of hateful comments people throw at others because of what stack they work in. It's sheer overlooking of opportunities.

Comments like the above are like saying all wood is bad because we saw a house built poorly out of wood.

This approach excludes folks from the real huge innovation projects that are coming due as these platforms and projects are gradually renewed or refactored.

I've worked with many programming environments, and PowerBuilder stands out as one of the worst. I remember exchanging emails and doing phone calls with the developers about some howling bad bugs in their COM support, bad enough that we wound up ditching PB despite the market it represented. Judging from the bugs I was finding and the release notes that I was reading (which covered issues that included how to avoid writing code that would crash the compiler), PB was a mess under the hood.

I don't abide by broken tools, but I do respect humility and realize that bugs and flawed designs happen. However, I will have no truck with companies that ship buggy, crashy products and then do the whole "manage customer expectations" dance in an obvious attempt to avoid remedial engineering. When I used it, the product was several major releases old, and they seemed to think they could trade workarounds and sophistry for fixing bugs.

Hateful? Probably. Undeserved? Definitely not.

I agree Powerbuilder isn't the best tech - the point I was trying to make is every tech has it's pro's and cons, and older techs have more to maintain while trying to stay current and get ahead, just like newer platforms can suffer from a lack of maturity. Powerbuilder didn't do itself any favors by trying to rest on it's existing marketshare.

The kind of hair pulling I heard from buddies working on otherwise interesting systems in PB was quite deep, several nights a week in it's height. The issue of using an older version of PB seemed to make things worse.

Still, it seems relevant to look at a technology in it's time compared to what else was available, and wonder if this is where today's language+framework apologists may end up in the future when one could no longer explain away their current favorite platform in 2018 as a flavour de jour.

My last comment is not not directed at you in any way - You articulated a depth of experience: Opinions based on hearsay or surface interactions about a tech is not much different in the venom spread than than judging a group on the color of their skin based on one interaction and an underlying propensity to find fault. It's harsh, but maybe it's not recognizable that it's a similar muscle.

A friend of mine actually build a PowerBuilder decompiler and custom debugger, partly because he's smart, and partly because he was bored and had to maintain PowerBuilder projects.

I think he said at one time the developers contacted him regarding a bug.

> If you're ever offered an opportunity to work with these systems, just run away.

And we wonder why the only bidders on these projects are frauds.

I worry that nobody who hires a contractor has the slightest clue how to develop software.

After working contracts off and on for a while. I’m starting to think of “we need a contractor” as an open admission of guilt.

I wish code for america would take these kinds of things on. I assume the DMV rules are sufficiently similar that most/all of them could benefit from opensource.

https://www.codeforamerica.org/

I’m guessing it’s actually the humans that cost $$$ not some source code.

They spent $5M on Oracle software. That's a LOT of someone else's source code they paid for.

And at one point Oracle was just using open source software, adding on some things and calling it something with a $10k/cpu cost. They may still do this.

What makes you think they would be able to do anything about it. Assume they're above average in technical competence: so what? Whatever makes you think technical competence has anything to do with any of this?

How does this happen?

Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to outsource the development of this critical system to a foreign contractor? Did anybody stop and think about what might happen to all of that public money if the contract is breached?

You can can tell from the auditors report that the RFP or other solicitation was fubar. Many of the deficiencies there are standard contract terms that were probably missing.

It also sounds like the project was getting done on the cheap. The actual dollar figure is buried a bit... it sounds like they got their hands on a big wad of cash and went on a spending spree. I bet they bought a new mainframe, lots of of network crap, etc.

The poor procurement practices led to the state ending up with some two-bit bodyshop that just tried to job out the work. My guess is that the state program side is barebones and some political hack pushed this through.

I do kind of suspect that a lot of the problem was really their ability to impose a $1/user "tech" fee. Once you get to that point you really don't have to explain over much to anyone unless things go massively wrong (which they did here).

They'd probably have been much better off it they hadn't managed to get a truly massive amount of money together. Spending tons of money properly is far harder than people realize. Unless you have a cadre of people who've closely managed outsourced contractors before you are basically going to be giving a lot of people learning opportunities on how things can go wrong.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was less a political hack than someone getting exactly what they asked for and having no idea what to do with that horrible fate. Imagine quoting millions to fix multiple complex underlying problems and being handed that with what was no doubt an unrealistic timeline.If adding people to a late project often makes it later, the same is often true of money. Knowing how to spend millions of dollars on a tech project is a skill, and it isn't a common one in chronically underfunded departments.

Interesting. In my teeny tiny company our insurance policy states that we must have all contacts over a certain value reviewed by an attorney. Wondering how a vast beurocracy somehow isn’t subject to that rule?

Lawyers will tell you if things are legal. They won’t generally stop you from doing dumb, legal things.

In my experience that is absolutely not true. Perhaps you need a better lawyer?

A lawyer who will tell you that a hybrid cloud/on-premises solution using Oracle isn't using today's industry-insider (read: us) agreed best practices and might waste a bunch of money?

Good luck finding and having enough money to pay that lawyer.

We're talking about completely different things. My comment was a follow on to this:

>Many of the deficiencies there are standard contract terms that were probably missing.

Lawyers exist to make sure you don't sign a contract that is missing standard contract terms.

Happens all the time. Worst example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

According to the audit document, the company was Tech Mahindra.

I am genuinely surprised when a 8 to 9 figure software project ever succeeds.

But I'm also amazed that the government spent $25mil before they realized they got completely bamboozled. There's something shady going on here.

As someone who has worked with state funding contracts I disagree that this implies anything shady. Hourly rates for consultants at exorbitantly high. It also depends on how the project is big, fixed feed versus hourly bulk. Regardless, the amount of hours quoted and the rates are inflated based on politics.

It's not shady, its just incompetent people signing contracts to promise tech companies bags of money.

From the article: "the project was not managed by the state's Enterprise IT Services division, and was managed solely by outside master service agreement contractors hired through the DMV's internal IT department."

If that is not shady I don't know what is.

It's not shady, its politics. The DMV IT department didn't want to deal with "corporate" aka Nevada Enterprise IT. Perhaps Nevada IT was too busy digging out of a debacle with healthcare IT systems to be bothered with DMV stuff.

>> spent $25mil before they realized they got completely bamboozled.

Governments regularly spend that much just on the procurement process, long before the bamboozling can even begin.

I feel like I could provide the Nevada DMV with whatever it needs for significantly less than $78 million.

Only one way to find out! There's so much opportunity to improve the "non-sexy" work of governments and institutions and the interface between them and the people they help/serve/administer that it's crazy there isn't more start-up attention focused there.

In reality, there is very little realized opportunity to improve the 'non-sexy' work of governments and institutions, because you're up against either big names like Oracle or <insert official's nephew's name here>.

I won't argue that Oracle isn't optimized to meet and take advantage of public institutional procurement policies but if you've ever seen one of Oracle's offerings, it's easy to surpass their quality and given their rates, trivial to come in cheaper.

My mom was an instructor with the community college system in Colorado and about ten years back they rolled out an Oracle based-and-delivered student enrollment product that failed during its first enrollment after being deployed because it had been set up to only allow 100 concurrent connections to the state-wide persistence solution. Oracle was of course 'earning' something like $90,000 every day the outage continued despite it being their own direct fault.

I can't stress enough how incompetent or over-priced Oracle solutions are for pretty much anyone.

Like wavefunction points out, only one way to find out. You'll never know unless you try.

$78m over 5 years for 25 (probably average) developers and a few licenses is excessive. Not sure what massive tech problems the Nevada DMV is trying to solve, but I doubt it's much more than a DB cluster with a web app or two thrown in front of it. Tech Mahindra's developers may be average, but their marketing department seems to be exceptional!

Integration with existing/external systems is likely a huge part of the cost. If the DMV integrates with the police systems (so police can run license/registration), they need to be integrated. If they have license plate scanners that do the same, they need to be integrated (or replaced). Point of sale terminals for things like license renewals might need integration.

No system exists in isolation.

This type of waste occurs in all levels of government. My last employer was spending over $1,000,000/year maintaining some horrible SharePoint sites that were rarely used.

This sort of problem is not limited to government. Private companies waste money on all sorts of dead-end nonsense - all the time.

It's why IBM and Oracle are still in business.

In all my years in tech, I have literally never heard a single person (that wasn't part of a flashy ad campaign) exclaim that IBM or Oracle offered their company a solution at a good rate, got it setup in time and that it works well and solved their problems.

I think I have read one anecdote: Apple stores and Oracle. I read somewhere that Steve Jobs was happy with the point of sales software and that there is some Oracle in it (and that Jobs and Ellison knew each other)

Only positive Oracle anecdote I know of.

They didn’t just know each other:

“Ellison's idea was to buy Apple and immediately make Jobs CEO.”

“Jobs proposed what Ellison called "a more circuitous route." He would persuade Apple to acquire Next, and then join Apple's board.”

“After Jobs was CEO of Apple again — interim CEO initially — Ellison joined Apple's board.”

https://www.recode.net/2016/5/13/11672932/larry-ellison-stev...

Of course they do, but it's a much bigger issue when it's done with taxpayer money. I don't really care what Apple or BP waste money on, but I hate seeing important services degraded/cut in order to keep spending on wasteful projects like this.

How do you suppose we fix this? I'm not being factious here.

I’d start with asking the questions: who was responsible for the contract and it’s implemntation, and what were their motives, incentives, qualifications and abilities. Then I would ask the same question, but what would the IDEAL motives, abilities, incentives and qualifications of that person be? Then try bridging those gaps....

be much more aggressive about sharing solutions between institutions or making them available as open source outright (see https://code.gov/#/).

How different can the needs from one DMV to another be?

Do you think this is a place where we could take notes from Estonia? X-Road[0] for example, they call their data exchange layer. I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems to specify some common protocol so various government (and private) services can all work together. I know their system is also very citizen focused, but perhaps something similar could reduce the costs of integrating the specific needs of specific state agencies with the overall set of services a state government provides/uses.

[0]https://www.ria.ee/en/x-road.html

Speaking from afar, but I've noticed that Americans tend to feel very strongly about state rights and independence, as well as the opportunity for someone to profit somewhere. Wouldn't that work against what you're saying?

I do think it makes complete sense though - reinventing the wheel in each state is crazy.

I wonder if any state agency has ever hired and built a solution internally, proven its effectiveness, and then somehow sold it to other states?

What you're saying is quite possibly true.

This is part of a bigger problem - it is just so hard to understand the internal structure, processes and needs of these organizations.

There must be some people on HN who have extensive government contracting experience and can shed a light on this?

I'm sure that money will find its way back to America, in political donations to be exact. Kind of gullible to think these 'failed to deliver' accidents keep happening on accident after half the budget has been spent.

I would love to see how much of the purchasing and decision making committee was composed of people who didn't understand technology, let alone how to procure and implement technology.

At the highest levels, there is a self-preservation disease permeating most organizations where CxO's try to fake it till they make it with the IT/Systems decisions they take on, and it turns out like this.

Ah the good old responsibility dodging and blaming following legacy modernization project gone off the rails. At least they got out spending only $27 million. The state says bait and switch, I wager the contractor never got requirements or basic documentation for the project.

I’m at a company now that’s planning one of these projects for a core system. I’m looking forward to having a front row seat!

Read the audit i posted above. The contractor didn't even show up LOL

Tech Mahindra contractors, not surprising. An acquaintance of mine came in on a job with them- they pay all their guys salary which is kind of crazy. That guy was doing better than the hourly contractors with family time and pay. Something sketchy is up with them.

Not that odd. A lot of contracting companies do that, then bill you out at a day rate.

Kinda offtopic, but apparently they also own a Formula E team. Big money.

I am currently working on a largish COBOL codebase which the company has tried 4 times to port to Java, each time by porting all at once. It cannot be done all at once.

It's stories like this one that make me want to pivot and go work on projects for the government. I KNOW I can contribute something useful.

I wish there was a collection of these.

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