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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it have to interface to a whole bunch of other government and commercial sites, which have their own APIs and data formats? I believe I read somewhere (probably earlier HN discussion months ago) that dealing with all that made this a ridiculously more complex project than it might first appear based on what you actually see on the site.

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So if your trying to point out that this is more then just a custom wordpress site then your correct. If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically complex task requiring extensive technical expertise you are wrong. A majority of that money is most likely overhead and even then the development is done via integrations with enterprise vendors so another large chunk of change goes to pay the IBM's and Oracle's of the world for their databases and webservers along with their "consultants" to get it all tied together.

FWIW the current enrollment is 6mil so if you assume a very poor conversion rate of 1% then that is 600 million page views over the signup period and that comes down to about 38 views per second. At peak load that would only be like 1k concurrent views ( assuming a poisson distribution )

> If however you perceive this to be some intrinsically complex task requiring extensive technical expertise you are wrong.

Have you ever worked on these projects before ? It DOES require technical expertise.

Working with legacy and enterprise systems requires knowledge that most developers think they could handle until they are actually in the weeds trying to understand some arcane domain model or file format. Combine that with the integration and scaling challenges and it is quite a technical problem.

Is it expensive sure. But to dismiss these projects without any visibility or understanding of the challenge requires some arrogance.

I used to be a government contractor so I am well aware of the challenges of integrating the various systems. The challenges are almost never technical I mean consider your argument here you essentially have a system connecting multiple databases that needs to retrieve and reformat the data then store it again. That process is not complex even at the scale they are doing it ( 8 Million registrants, even 350 Million wouldn't be a problem for most database systems )

Yes documentation is always lacking and there is some reverse engineering that needs to be done, and yes there will always be some stupid wrinkle in the process, but this is a well understood problem and claiming its a challenge due to "Legacy Systems" is just a way of justifying the over 100% overhead that the government runs.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Legacy integration systems typically cost several hundreds of millions of dollars and take a decade to complete.

Legacy integration is huge and horrendously complex task. The coding is the least of it.

Thats funny when I ran a team of developers responsible for integrating Legacy projects that went as far back as VMS control systems we managed to make it work with limited problems. At the same time I worked with teams that couldn't manage to "integrate" systems consisting of databases from different vendors.

Yea, I'm pretty positive you're both correct--it was a government related project that they needed utmost of security and secrecy while rapidly building it. All of which are very challenging obstacles for developers

>they needed utmost of security

I can absolutely guarantee you that they do not have the utmost of security. For a project to be really secure, you need extremely talented and meticulous developers. Judging by the clusterfuck that was Healthcare.gov's original launch, that does not describe the people involved. For example, this sentence (lifted from Wikipedia) raises a million red flags in my mind re. data consistency checking and sanitation: "Even for those that did manage to enroll, insurance providers later reported some instances of applications submitted through the site with required information missing.". No project like that can feasibly have the "utmost of security".

haha needed and what they got are entirely two different things. It's unfortunate, but the problem was that because it was a government website, the developers were strictly not allowed to get help, i.e. have someone review it/ask a friend for help/post on stackoverflow/etc.

this probably was the source of the initial failure.

The final product they produce needs security to protect the end users' medical records, but why on Earth would you need secrecy for what is essentially a public works product?

That's probably true, and that's where I'd guess most of the cost came from. I'm just saying that if they only had to serve 350,000 people it probably would have been almost the same cost.

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