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Comment by brunosan | Hacker News Reader

I fondly remember how a small DC startup subsubsubcontracted to do the front landing page was able to ensure that at least people landed on healthcare.gov page and not a 500 error page.

All thanks for a single server (with one backup) using Jekyll, if I remember the story correctly.

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As a civic technologist currently contracting, I feel like more Americans should know that procurement rules all but prevent federal offices from doing their own software development and that most of it is, as you wrote, subsubsubcontracted.

And that generally, the people who've won the contract to build the website or application are not the same people who've won the other contract to manage the databases, which is a totally different someone than those who've won the contract to run the DNS system, oh and also that the DNS contractors and the database contractors definitely bid on the website contract but didn't win so they want the website contractor to fail so they can get a second chance at bidding on the contract when you do

Don't forget the database contractor and frontend contractor aren't allowed to directly talk to each other but have to make contact through their individual contracting officers.

and that the leads from both of the other teams are on the change control board eagerly waiting for your change to come before them so they can find the least-obvious-but-still-patently-obvious excuses to make your request look unprepared to the govvies who pay them in lieu of having any expertise so "new table" requests can be shot down with lowbrow questions like "But have we thought about the security implications?!?"

what's the penalty like for backchanneling?

Pissed off contracting officers at the least, losing their trust will ensure you will be micromanaged on all the things to the letter in all the hundreds of pages of contracts you signed. They can make life hell and probably stop you from renewing the contract at the least, or make it an instant recompete at the worst.

What does it have to do with procurement rules? I was under the impression that it was just that the federal gov't won't pay salaries that are remotely competitive, so the only way they can get work done by competent people is by hiring a contractor who then pays market wages to a consultant.

Eh, I've worked with a whole lot of incredibly intelligent, talented people in the federal government. If there's a problem they have with wages, it's more that they can't retain the best people any more, but it wasn't so much of a problem 20 years ago before Silicon Valley salaries skyrocketed so quickly. The security of the civil service and a guaranteed pension used to make up for the slightly lower pay, but it doesn't make up for 1/3 the pay. Given it takes a literal act of Congress to change the pay bands and Congress won't even fund the existing budget they already passed, they simply can't adjust at the speed of industry.

But they probably will eventually add a compensating bonus for critical work the way they had to do with medical doctors. Physicians that work directly for DoD make an enormous bonus compared to others in the same pay grade but different career field because otherwise they wouldn't be able to hire anyone. They react slowly but eventually react.

What you're talking about, though, is a problem with procurement procedures. It's far easier to get through Congress than any change in operational budget that involves increased pay for federal employees, even if the outcome is otherwise identical. And it frankly makes sense to a large extent. Even if they have to pay way more for a private workforce, they only have to justify it for a several year project. Hire the same number of civil servants and you're committing to employing them for the next 30 years. They need to know they'll consistently have work for them to do. They can't just institute mass layoffs and hiring spurs on the other side the way industry can.

> but it wasn't so much of a problem 20 years ago

I mean, ok? 20 years ago is a long time. As you say, pay is now like ~1/3 that of industry, and the pension doesn't make up for it.

> What you're talking about, though, is a problem with procurement procedures. It's far easier to get through Congress than any change in operational budget that involves increased pay for federal employees

Wait, is raising the pay of federal employees considered "procurement"? If not, aren't you agreeing that procurement of software consulting services is an end around the main issue, which is that wages of federal employees are too low (a non-procurement issue)?

> you're committing to employing them for the next 30 years.

Not really. All my job offers started with "This is at-will employment".

Yes, employers may fear lawsuits from entitled employees, but it's actually not such a large risk as general public believes.

It is notoriously extraordinarily difficult to fire an underperforming federal employee. It is possible, but generally, you are committing to keeping this person around for quite some time.

Do you have a reference handy? Would love to learn more about this.

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka

Should all gov websites move to the recreation.gov model where the contractor is incentivized disproportionately on a percentage basis ? It seems that customers get shafted no matter what; the latter at least creates a better product.

They should move to the gov.uk model where an in-house team of experts sets standards and provides informed accountability.

The U.S. federal version is the U.S. Digital Service, which regularly advertises in the HN “who is hiring” threads.

The initial version of healthcare.gov, before the exchanges launched, was a small informative site that was built by Development Seed, a small DC-based web shop. It was built in what would today be called “static page generation” style and therefore was able to be hosted on small hardware. At the time it was considered pretty advanced tactics.

I think this may be what you are thinking of. To my knowledge that site was entirely replaced when the federal exchange launched, and there was not a serious challenge serving the landing page since it did not take in or process any personal data. It was only once you started trying to find a plan that everything ground to a halt.

Development Seed also developed another project you may have heard of: Mapbox. (To which they eventually pivoted the entire company.)

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