Every project uses tons of code that is already built etc. Still doesn’t change anything about the ridiculousness of 500 million lines of code.
You just don’t realize the magnitude of the ridiculousness of this erroneous claim (most likely a typo).
If I told you I built a building that is 10,000 feet tall in 3 months would you think its possible? That’s the level of ridiculousness of these numbers.
How can you say it “doesn’t change anything”? Of course it changes things. You are the one who made the calculation of lines per day, and you are the one who made this exact distinction when it came to programs of big banks.
I guess you can still argue that it’s not feasible, but you can’t base it on LOC per day and the like, as you were doing.
OK. Truth is I don’t know anything about writing code, and it sounds like you do. My intention was just make a couple of points. I’m not asserting that it’s possible. Perhaps it is a typo (or an incorrect guess).
He who does not learn from the past is condemned to relive it.
Obama/Reid/Pelosi: You don’t think we’re just going to walk away from Obamacare!
The American People: Yes. In the end, you will walk away. Because 250 Democrats simply cannot control 310 million Americans, if those Americans refuse to cooperate.
Wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t make the rest of us relive it as well.
So far it’s only about 144 Americans who refuse to cooperate.
Plus the legislatures in what, 36 different states?
The root cause of all this was a government that passed a transformative law using legislative trickery and without any bipartisan support, despite the fact that a majority of the population opposed it.
The additional cause was that same administration’s total mismanagement of the process, their constant lying to the public about the true state of the process, and witholding requirements changes from the development team for political reasons.
Every time they were asked about the development of the exchanges and the web portal, they claimed that everything was proceeding exactly as planned with no problems. This put them in a box and made it politically impossible to do the right thing and delay the whole fiasco until their systems were ready.
They are still lying to the public about it now. They claimed that the problem with the web portal was excess demand when they knew it had failed with just a few hundred users on it. They rolled out people for press conferences who had ‘successfully bought insurance on the web site’ when it turned out they hadn’t, or had only done so with much additional help or with key features turned off like the subsidy calculator that needs the data from all those other systems. They trotted out people who claimed to be regular citizens who bought the new insurance online, who turned out to be shills for Organizing For America who had not purchased anything.
This ‘tech surge’ is just another smoke screen. There are only two possibilities here: Either the site will be ready in a few weeks, in which case parachuting in more engineers will just slow things down and make the management of the system more confusing, or it’s a total clusterfuck that needs to be re-architected from the ground up, in which case you sack the people responsible and bring in new ones, but then you’re not talking about a few weeks of work - you’re talking about a few years of work.
One of those must be true. The administration’s story, that they’re almost finished but they’re bringing in a ‘surge’ of engineers to push this thing over the line in a few weeks, is not true. It can’t be true. The best that can be said about it is that it was a decision made for political cover or because the person who made the decision has no understanding of projects of this sort.
Sam, you really need to calm down, its not good for a Canadian to get this worked up. We’ll be fine, try not to worry about us so much.
The one that immediately came to mind was the IRS scandal, which Obama claimed he first heard about on the news like everyone else.
For a response to that specific claim, allow me to quote from a pundit you may be familar with:
”I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announcing it on television!”
- John Stewart
I’m an engineer and work in this field. This disaster makes all of us look bad. It also highlights how misunderstood this kind of development is, and how little appreciation there is of how difficult such projects can be - especially by the big thinkers in government who believe they can just snap their fingers and will it into being.
Can you imagine how upset you’d be if the government launched a ‘message board snark program’ that was totally unfunny, and people responded by saying, “Hey, anyone can be snarky on a message board in a humorous way. It’s not possible that the government screwed that up.” You might take personal offense to that, man.
You mean the IRS scandal that wasn’t really a scandal?
That’s funny. Which is kinda the point.
Serves Obama right for outsourcing it to Canada. 
The fact that this is the trench the partisan oppositionists have had to fall back to, the result of Obamacare’s popularity, tells the world everything they might need to know about the validity of their views.
Sam:
Obama is not a computer geek, he has to rely on advice. He has no expertise to overrule the advice he is given. He supports infrastructure investment, he cannot design a bridge.
You know? All of the facts are at your poutine stained fingertips, are they? Which is why you can fling these charges around with such certainty, because you know exactly what the problem is? With all due awe, permit me a smidgen of doubt?
Take Windows 95. Or more recently and more importantly, the release of Grand Theft Auto 5. I am advised by my resident expert, the Err Apparent, that the online version released was a fucking disaster, nothing worked right every thing was beyond all recognition. Fixed. Matter of days. Virtual death and binary carnage abounds.
The release date is the date of the last beta testing. That’s when you find out what you fucked up, that’s when you fix it. Now, I’m just a country boy from Waco, but I expect much the same thing applies here. We’ll see. But, in the meantime, perhaps you will forgive me for not flinging myself around the room and tearing my hair?
…
Funny, that’s what I said about the Iraq War.
Still working on the design for that statue of GeeDubya in downtown Baghdad. Just a few more days…
If the state of the system did not get communicated to him, then it sounds like he has some incompetent people working for him that should be fired.
If he did know, then it’s on him.
Successful implementations find out they’ve screwed up a relatively small number of things compared to the project overall.
This one is a failure.
And Jeff Immelt knows nothing about nuclear engineering or jet engine design. But if a GE power plant melted down or a jet crashed because the engine exploded, just who would you hold responsible?
You guys on the left are amazing - you’ll haul corporate CEOs through the mud for every transgression their companies make, but when your president, who is the CEO of executive branch of government, presides over a disaster like this all you can think to do is provide cover for him. It’s just never his fault, is it?
Here’s the way it’s supposed to work: The President is supposed to pick advisors who DO know this stuff. They are supposed to advise him as to what’s realistic and what isn’t, and keep him informed on the progress of things. The President is also responsible for picking his cabinet, which is supposed to be filled with the kinds of people who either have the knowledge required to run the government or be good enough managers to know how to find the people that are qualified.
When Bush picked a head of FEMA who was not qualified, you had no problem blaming him, did you?
In any executive hierarchy like this, the ultimate responsibility ALWAYS has to go to the top. That’s what a CEO is FOR. He’s at the pinnacle of the bureaucracy; the guy responsible for making the whole thing work. This is true in the private sector, and yet in any company bigger than a mom-and-pop organization the CEO will be responsible for things he has no personal expertise in. A CEO can go to jail if he signs off on documents that break laws. Despite not being an accountant, a CEO has to put his name and legal responsibility on the line when signing off on a company’s balance sheets. And so it goes.
Obama appears to be a lazy, lousy executive. He should have had better oversight into this. He should have been asking hard questions, and he should have had experts to advise him on whether the answers were reasonable. This is his signature achievement. It has his bloody name on it. And he couldn’t even be bothered or didn’t know how to find out how it was doing? Incredible.
Sebelius claims that the first Obama heard of any of these problems was on TV. Does that pass the smell test for you? If you think it’s true, what do you think that says about his ability to run the government? Why should people trust ANY large program he’s pushing if he’s not competent to know if they’re even working well and apparently doesn’t have the skills to know who to ask for advice?
What would you say if a major company’s largest project was caught violating numerous engineering practices, and that resulted in massive public damage, and the CEO testified that he had no idea there were any problems and learned about them on TV with everyone else? Would you say, “Hey, the guy’s not a safety engineer - cut him some slack!”? Or would you call for his head?
I hate poutine. Disgusting stuff. It makes my heart tremble just thinking about it.
Nope. I’ve already said that all we have to go on is what’s been made public, and that the back end coding problems are hard to suss out because we can’t inspect the code like we can with the client. It’s made harder by the active disinformation campaign being waged by this government. However, we do know a few facts, and those are damning enough.
For example, no software engineer would disagree with me that starting end-to-end integration testing a week or two before the rollout of such a massive system is anything less than gross negligence. The administration has already testified that this was the case. We also know that the administration flat-out lied (and is still lying) when they claimed that the real problem was just too much demand. We have testimony that the integration test revealed that the system would crash with just a few hundred people on it. And that as a result of those crashes, some aspects of the system were left completely untested before it was released to the public.
If a private company had done this, you’d be calling for more regulations and using it as an example of the failures of Capitalism. When government does it, you want to give them a pass. Because, ideology.
The scope of those problems were nothing compared to this. A better analogy would be Grand Theft Auto being released when the code was in a state where it wouldn’t even launch. Windows 95 actually worked right out of the box, and many people had no problems with it. Most of the bugs were due to 3rd party drivers and legacy hardware.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Here’s how it goes: First, you alpha test, by putting the code in front of a small group of users who are technically savvy and can help you find major issues. When you’re satisfied that all the features are generally working as expected, you start a beta test, exposing the product to a subset of the public with a disclaimer that they are using beta software and not to rely on it. Based on the results of the beta test, you may do a second beta. Or you may decide the software is ready to ship, in which case you release a final ‘release candidate’ that includes all the last minute fixes from the beta. Only after that RC passes through the beta community do you actually release the software to production.
For Windows 7, that process took almost two years.
For web sites it’s different. Usually for a system like this you start with a pilot project - you pick a small geographic or logical grouping of power users and you let them beat on the system. For a pilot project you staff extra support engineers to help people through the process or manually complete it for them if it breaks. That’s when you work out the initial integration bugs that weren’t caught during the integration testing.
Then, if you’re worried about the system’s ability to scale, you do a phased rollout, opening it up to progressively larger groups of people. If you find scale problems, you pull back the phased trial, fix the bugs, and roll it out again.
From what I can tell, none of this was done. Integration testing was virtually nonexistent, carried out way too late, and it FAILED. They released it to the public anyway without any disclaimers, and made millions of people feel the pain. It was gross dereliction that would have opened any private company up to legal trouble such as class action lawsuits.
You should be the one really angry about this. You’re the one who wants big government to work. John Stewart has it right: Progressives should be furious, because this administration is destroying the people’s trust in government as the answer to complex problems.
And yet you didn’t learn anything from being right?
It’s on him anyway, because he’s supposed to know. If I’m a project manager and my project fails, I’m held responsible. I can’t say “But I had lame programmers working for me!” Sorry, but the point of being in charge means you’re in charge and you carry the responsibility for the whole thing.
The proper answer isn’t that he should just fire people and problem solved - the proper answer is that he should have never hired those incompetents in the first place, and he should have made sure that he had visibility into what was going on by establishing proper reporting practices and vetting them with his own consultants. Perhaps he should have set up a task force of experts to oversee progress. But in any event, he’s responsible. Just as Bush was ultimately responsible for the failures of FEMA during the Katrina disaster.
This is actually something I said about Romney, as one would expect I voted for Romney but I didn’t imagine he’d be a great President. I think he’d have probably almost as much trouble working with Republicans in the House as the current Democrat President does, and whatever areas Romney was a traditional Republican like me, he showed a willingness to be a Tea Party Republican when push came to shove (and it would come to that during a Romney Presidency.)
But (and I never once in the campaign thought Romney would win), I did feel that one thing Romney would undeniably do better is function as chief executive of the Federal government. If for no other reason than unlike Obama, who mostly appointed academics and crony ideologues to key positions I think Romney would be more keen on appointing actual professional managers to top positions in the Federal government. A lot of the administrative problems with the Obama Administration come from a large number of his executive appointees being policy wonks/academics/etc who are very smart people but are not capable administrators. Being a college professor for example is a job that is mostly held by smart people, probably smarter on average than CEOs of private companies. But that doesn’t mean college professors would make good CEOs, most wouldn’t.
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This was literally 98% of their code, they get paid by the line. 
True.
I was really kind of thinking along the lines of, did someone under him lie, or did he know and chose to go live anyways.