> Were those people stupid? probably not, but they were giving out lucrative contracts to any company that said they could help. So the makers of the original healtchare.gov (and by proxy the American public and Obama administration) were being taken advantage of for their ignorance.
Good points but that sounds to me like too simple a story. The people managing healthcare.gov weren't working their first day or managing their first project; you don't get that job without some experience. And if you have some experience, you know what you don't know, you know how to deal with those situations.
(I'm not implying some other specific story - I don't know what happened. I'm just wary of such simple answers.)
I saw Mikey Dickerson talk about this at the time, and he was very explicit that the engineers on the project were all perfectly capable, but they were hobbled by an IT services culture that made them all terrified to be the person blamed for any
mistake.
He also said there was no culture of real-time monitoring. They literally had a TV running CNN, and whenever the chyron said "healthcare.gov is down again" they would spring into action. Amazing.
I can't really phantom that. When I was six grade or something, I had old PC with Debian in my room as "server" to play around and serve some random stuff from. And I had real time monitoring on that.
Good points but that sounds to me like too simple a story. The people managing healthcare.gov weren't working their first day or managing their first project; you don't get that job without some experience. And if you have some experience, you know what you don't know, you know how to deal with those situations.
(I'm not implying some other specific story - I don't know what happened. I'm just wary of such simple answers.)