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Comment by wizzard | Hacker News Reader

You would think that the "A-team" would have already been on such a high-profile and time-sensitive project from the beginning, but who knows.

No matter how you feel about Obamacare I think it's had an effect I certainly never would have predicted: At this point it's become kind of an indictment of the software industry, whether deserved or undeserved. It seems like every news story ends up insinuating that devs are incompetent.

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Time sensitive? Sure there was a fairly hard deadline but the Oregon site has been under construction for 3 years.

As for incompetent developers, I don't know if the public thinks that at all. I think the standard public response is the usual gov't bureaucracy getting in the way. States communicating with multiple Fed departments has got to be daunting. And if one of those isn't online and working properly or changes requirements midway through you've got some problems.

I hope this is a watershed moment for government IT. There have been bigger government IT failures before (IRS modernization - 12 years, $3.7 billion) but never before has a government IT project failure jeopardized the success of a major policy initiative and had negative consequences for millions of Americans.

I hope this is finally the kick in the pants that the government needs to fixing the fundamentally broken parts of the government IT procurement process.

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