A Software Engineer's take on Healthcare.gov

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday October 18, 2013 · 9:59 AM PDT

2013/10/18 · 09:59

I'll start by introducing myself, because it has some small relevance to the topic: Hi, I'm Welt, long time lurker, very occasional poster and I almost never write diaries. I'm a software engineer that has been in the industry for 15+ years. Having cut my teeth during the crazy days of the dotcom bubble, I've worked at quite a few places. From giant chip manufacturers to mom and pop startups. Five of my fifteen years were spent working on an earmark funded defense industry related startup. Hindsight being 20/20 it was a project destined to fail from day one, for a variety of reasons, none of them being technology. While this is neither here nor there, because of my time in the defense sector (so to speak), I look at much of our defense budget as wealthy white guy welfare.

I recently stumbled upon this write-up on some of the stumbling blocks that Healthcare.gov went through that has some excellent specifics about the process failures in government contracting that lead to the failures of Healthcare.gov (and plague the government):

If you want an IT project to fail, allocate a bunch of dollars to it. If you want it to be a total disaster, do that, plus let Congress design the requirements and set the deadlines. The disconnect between Congress’ view of software and the developer’s view of software has never been more vast. Then you have a force multiplier: Congress’ seemingly willful ignorance over how the procurement process actually works.

If you'll join me below the fold, I'll give you my somewhat snarky take on what I believe is wrong with the process: Read More

I stumped my congressman

welt

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday October 02, 2013 · 8:40 AM PDT

2013/10/02 · 08:40

Today I called my congressman's office (Peter Roskam - 6th district Illinois) to register my disgust with the shutdown and to plead with them to pass a clean CR so we can get the government back up and running, then I asked: "So I have a question, if you do get your way and you manage to defund or delay Obamacare, now that it's live and people have already signed up, what happens to those people? What is your plan?"

The response was: "Uhm.. uhh.. that's.. that's a really good question.. I'll have to get back to you.. can you leave your information so we can get back in touch?" So I left my name address and phone number.

This is a question I would like to see being asked more and more. They have a goal (defund the ACA) but there is no discussion of a plan on how to handle the realities of that goal. In my most humble of opinions we need to call them out for their lack of planning, it's that behavior that makes it most apparent that they are unable to lead this country.

But I do beg you to please be polite to whoever picks up the phone if you do call to ask. They are just poorly paid workers like the rest of us (and their bosses are busy fighting to take away their insurance subsidies!). There is no need to be rude to some poor intern who is taking a million rude calls a minute right now.

RSS