Toronto company cloned ArriveCan in 48 hours to show the government overpaid | Hacker News Reader

Toronto company cloned ArriveCan in 48 hours to show the government overpaid

toronto.ctvnews.ca

6 pointsDBoJane7 comments

> Jaitly acknowledged it takes less time to clone an app than it does to build it from scratch, but still, he said it goes to show the amount of effort, time and money it could have taken.

Building is relatively the easy part. Deciding what to build...that's where resources burn.

Maybe the gov did overpay. But it's silly for a "cover band" to play (e.g.) "Satisfaction" and then say anyone can be The Rolling Stones. That Mick & Co are an over-compensated commodity.

There has been a lot of buzz about this recently, and I'm surprised at the ignorance. Building a POC in a hackathon demonstrates none of the hard parts about bidding on and executing a government contract, especially one related to border security, personal information, etc. As you say, maybe they overpaid, and government procurement is broken, but these silly comparisons don't get into that at all.

"Tell me you have never worked on a government contract without telling me you've never worked on a government contract" might be a good summary.

Do the hackathon participants have security clearances? That would be the first in a massive list of things that make projects like this cost way more than what you would pay a kid to make for you on the weekend.

Yup. A hackathon might be 80% of the work. But it's the easy 80%.

The proven rule of thumb:

The first 80% of the work takes 20% of the time / resources.

The remaining 20% of the work sucks up 80% of the time / resources.

The latter? The Devil is in the details.

Right.. but 54 million..

Lets half that 27 million..

Wage for a UX expert ~ 200k/year

Wage for a rails (or elixir or python) dev ~ 200k/year

Wage for a Data person (AI stuff) ~ 200k/year

Let's half the 27 again.. 13 million. OR => 65 full time staff to build an app.

I agree, it is harder to design something. But at 1/4 the cost one could hire 30 UX experts and 30 devs.. I mean come on.. Really?

Regarding security.. they could have daily PEN testing by a dozen companies and the cost wouldn't be close.

Without going through the specific government requirements (functional/security/accessibility/performance/compliance/compatibility/...) none of the back-of-the-envelope calculations will be realistic. I hope you understand that.

To your point...add cost of high priced law firm familiar with such gov contracts.

Come to think of it, add liability insurance as well.

You forgot a few:

Company owner: 5M Company owners wife: 5M …

people definitely made out with a hefty payday.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com