OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k 234
itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."
It was actually $467 for the Android version (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It was actually $467 for the Android version (Score:5, Insightful)
You know as well as I do that you can't function as a developer unless you spend atleast half your day reporting progress to management.
If the six layers of management above you don't know what you're doing, how could you?
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Re:It was actually $467 for the Android version (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, God, sing it on the freaking mountain. My elocutory skills have increased 10 fold since getting a job developing software with all of the play by play ridiculous detail I have to go into with management.
Well why don't you start your own company and organise the management structure in what you consider a more sensible way?
The idea that companies employ layer upon layer of management for the sake of it is ludicrous. Do you really not think that if they could do it, any profit-driven organisation wouldn't sack all the administrative staff they could?
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I'm going to etch your comment onto something at my desk so that I will always remember it.
We were at the end a release and the two dev directors start hounding you "When will it be done? How much longer?", etc.
It gets to a point when you just want to say "It'll be done when it's checked in and code reviewed."
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You do realize that people other than you need to do something when your code finally works, or something different when it still doesn't work - right?
Sure, it probably doesn't take more than one person to stay on top of your work to keep what follows coordinated. But if you can't even answer one of them, you're not doing it right. Even if doing it right means telling the manager who gave you the task to specify and/or design it better, so it can be estimated by you, or by someone else better at the plannin
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When you have monthly deliverables, you get a pretty fast feedback loop. The code I write gets put in use pretty darn quick.
I'm not saying a manager keeping updated is a bad thing. I'm just saying that the frequent pings and requests for information can cause more harm than good, especially if a manager thinks they can get highly accurate and highly precise data every time.
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And, in accordance with my First Amendment Rights, I may also:
A) Bitch about it at every opportunity,
B) Make if fun of it at every opportunity.
Summary can't add (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Summary can't add (Score:4, Insightful)
The iPhone version was $56,000. The Blackberry version was $40,000. Together, they were $96,000. It says this very clearly in the original scan.
It doesn't sound that much once you have dealt with specs and tenders with govt orgs.
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The real question isn't whether they paid too much, but whether they should've made the app in the first place....
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I thought this was the real question. I just downloaded the app and it is apparently a half dozen rich text help pages and a simple calculator. The most complicated thing (for me, maybe there's an api that does it easily...) is that it can use the location data to maybe get the current temperature.
So, yeah, they probably shouldn't have bothered, AND they paid way too much for what they got. The iPhone app, at least, did not have any noticeable performance issue on my fourth-gen iPod Touch, and looks a li
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So the drive for privatisation and contract out all government task, as driven and controlled by lobbyists is working well for the US. One wonders how much it would have cost if done internally by full time employees with lobbyist interaction.
So is this government waste or typical corrupt private corporation manipulation of government spending ie the privatisation campaign dollar at work. So who drove the project, who employed that individual, were they a 'political' appointee.
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Government program manager here. 2 sources of this problem. It probably cost the contractor that much to meet the requirements; in this case I'd not jump all oevr the desire to blame the dirty contractors, unless they are NG.
1) Acquisition law is so fucking complex that everything they write has to be internally audited and vetted by a contractor.
2) IT acquisition regulations are built to prevent bad program managers from letting a contract for a bad system. Therefore, they are so complex that you can not b
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So the drive for privatisation and contract out all government task, as driven and controlled by lobbyists is working well for the US. One wonders how much it would have cost if done internally by full time employees with lobbyist interaction.
So is this government waste or typical corrupt private corporation manipulation of government spending ie the privatisation campaign dollar at work. So who drove the project, who employed that individual, were they a 'political' appointee.
This is most certainly government waste, I can't blame the private companies for taking a chance to get way overpaid. I would say this is either one of two things, the first being the person in charge of awarding the contract(s) to a company they got along with the best and also had a cost closest to what was budgeted. I have heard so many first hand stories of those in the government making sure to spend all money in a budget for fear of the budget being cut, there is no benefit to cutting costs apparent
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50k to develop an app? How is that high, again?
Sounds like someone is unfamiliar with developing real budgets for real companies.
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Simple:
in the original scan.
You did actually read my post, right?
Estimates for the additional programming and testing necessary to ensure similar functionality and accessibility access across the available iPhone and BlackBerry platforms are $56,000 and $40,000 respectively.
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This sounds like an article (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This sounds like an article (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know about that... Android and iOS offer very easy to work with developer APIs, I have personal experience. In 5 lines of code on iOS you can request the GPS location of the phone, then you just query the weather data from a public source... never done this personally, but I am sure there are weather data providers available for cheap or free....
If all this app does is display the weather, and display hardcoded recommendations based on that weather, any competent developer could have this done in a day... of course since this was a more professional job there is far more people involved, so with all the beurocratic nonsense that goes into your average disfunctional R&D unit I would be surprised if this took more than 2 weeks.
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Except in this case, it apparently cost $200k and it *still* wasn't professionally written. According to the author it was unstable and inaccurate.
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Re:This sounds like an article (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like, if you had read the fucking article? [imgur.com] Or were you going for sarcasm?
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http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/227687/worthless-osha-app-federal-government-costs-200000 [itworld.com] I read through the whole page, thank you very much. So I did read the fucking article.
The other link was "Rich Jones of GUN.IO", I didn't know that a link about the person would have more information about the subject than the linked article would.
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>>Calm down. The first link which was titled "how not to get heatstroke"
Note that while it is legal in the United States to claim that water can be used to treat dehydration and heatstroke, it may become illegal to do so in the EU: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU-bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html [telegraph.co.uk]
Obviously, the high cost of the app was ensuring compliance with all international laws regarding drinking water.
Usual Torygraph/Daily Fail slant as expected. The point was that the EU didn't want manufacturers of bottled water claiming some sort of unsubstantiated health benefit for their product. If you're seriously dehydrated, it's not just a question of necking down as much water as you can.
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oh? You'll need to pay for clearance..and pay the person who submit the bid, and then time doing specs, and servers, and connection, and testing, and rent, and documentation, and taxes.
Have you ever ran a business?
They should have developed it in house.
Programming is hard (Score:3)
Not really. Not saying its trivial, but with 99% of the applications out there, the actual coding isn't all that hard for someone who does it professionally, but it *is* time consuming to do it right.
What *is* hard is getting the requirements from your client, getting them to stick with it long enough to finish the project, and then supporting them afterward.
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Not to mention the government requires all contractors be CMMI level 3 certified which ups the costs a lot..... you pay for the quality of the code... not to mention I am sure the contract includes ownership of the code and IP involved
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The "quality of the code" was one of the things that started it all. It couldn't even correctly report the temperature.
Anyways, here's the source code [muckrock.com] of the app in question disclosed per FoIA.
Didn't yet really look in it, but it's 2k SLoC of what seems to be moderately shitty Java for Android version, for example.
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Planning (Score:2)
I'll bet most of that cash went into the rounds and rounds of planning and back-and-forth that come with ANY government project planning process, followed by user testing and compliance analysis. The actual coding process was probably less than 10% of the cost. That's still high, but gov't contractors are very well compensated.
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The app doesn't actually work. An example was it giving 140 degrees outside during winter in Philly.
How much user testing could they possibly have done?
Re:Planning (Score:5, Insightful)
This app worked fine on my devices.
What we have here is:
A person notorious anti government
A person who doesn't know what a heat index is
And someone who makes shit up.
So take everything that site has to offer with a grain of salt.
Can you really trust a review of this app by someone who doesn't know what a heat index is?
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That's still high, but gov't contractors are very well compensated.
You say that like it's something we should accept. You and I pay for the government, so we're paying for those very well compensated contractors. Why can't we find some reasonably priced contractors? Or hell, why doesn't the government have an in house software development team?
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:The acquisition process is broken (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the bureaucratic red tape exists to be able to say "we can account for your money" to the tax payer, but what the tax payer really wants is just to get the damn job done cost-effectively.
At least until there's some scandal. Then those same taxpayers start yelling about "why wasn't there anybody to check this stuff out?"
Keep in mind that the bureaucracy didn't just appear out of thin air. It came about because of scandals. We taxpayers want our tax dollars to not end up in some political crony's pocket, so there has to be lawyers to make sure this doesn't happen. There have to be accountants who track the money and make sure that it goes where it's supposed to go. There have to be auditors who make sure that the government is getting what it paid for.
It's really easy to have the knee-jerk reaction--"WHAT!? $100,000 to develop an app that I could probably write in a weekend?!" And I agree wholeheartedly with that reaction. The question is, would you rather pay $100,000 to make sure that the app appears on the other side or would you rather just write a check for x dollars and not have any idea what happened to that money? Nope, sorry, you can't have both.
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It isn't just government overhead either.
The cost to bidders of responding to government tenders is generally high - as, paradoxically, is the number of bidders. Organisations that habitually work on government contracts have somehow to recoup the amount of money they've spent on unsuccessful bids. Add that to the cost of writing the original call for tenders and evaluating all the bids that come in and the process is horrendously inefficient.
Knowing the limitations of the procurement process, you'd think g
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Well knucklehead, maybe you should have put in a bid for less money.
Of course, you can't because it's a lot more expensive to make an app then people think. Coding is the cheapest part.
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Depends on the tax payer. Some tax payers don't like the current administration, so it really comes down to them wishing they were CSI, detective and forensic accountant all in one. Or, at least asking their representatives to be like this (along with some freespeech encouragement, e.g., $$$ to their election fund).
And it'll cost MORE next time because of it (Score:5, Insightful)
The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
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It doesn't get better if they do it inhouse. When was the last time you heard "oh, I'm so glad the TSA are government employees and not private security firms!" Never, that's when.
Different situations call for different things. In theory, application development like this should be outsourced. Are you seriously proposing OSHA should hire a team of programmers to produce a single one-off app? Who wouldn't have anything further to do afterwards? Of course not. The problem is that the market of government con
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The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
Speaking as someone who works at a contracting firm: It's not simply that the government is inefficient. It's that they don't have the expertise and can't recruit or retain the expertise.
They're actually acutely aware that they're spending other people's money, and as such they have tons of controls to prevent wasting money, which usually means they that are highly risk-averse. So if you're a professional looking to do cutting edge stuff, you simply don't go into the government. Further, everything is based
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Actually, I'm a government contractor. But thank you for playing.
Re:And it'll cost MORE next time because of it (Score:5, Insightful)
And the left-wing, apparently, won't consider getting rid of OSHA altogether
...because we are all looking forward to our kids telling our grandkids how we died of mesotheleoma, or falling off a substandardly built scaffold, or from a chemical leak within an enclosed space.
Wow, Slashdot (Score:2)
Sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Informative)
Check out How much does it cost to develop an iPhone application? [stackoverflow.com] for a few numbers that are in line with what you roughed out here. There seems cause to complain about the quality of the result, but the price tag itself isn't surprising at all. $150 an hour is also cheap for a good mobile phone developer, given the rampant gold rush speculation driving up salaries in that section of the market right now.
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, it's easy these days to spend more than you need to on iOS development. And in the grand scheme of things I don't think the amount they overspent is that crazy, especially considering there's probably some overhead just because it's the government. I'm sure a lot of companies are overspending when getting apps made.
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Re-read the link, specifically the post by chockenberry who is apparently one of the devs for twitterific. He says that the project took way more than 200 hours. The first poster "guesstimates" 200 hours, but is clearly wrong.
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From where I'm setting Twitterrific seems like the "hello, world" of app development, but maybe this OSHA thing is even simpler; it's hard to get too excited about either. Regardless, it is a very popular app, which should have some correlation with the developers being decent. I'd like to think that "people who have won the app store competition and build something popular" are a more competent and productive group, on average, than "people who develop phone apps on government contract". And bad program
Re:Sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also factor in that a lot of people just look at the time it would take to write code, but ignore all the time it takes to sit down with a client, find out what they need, do design, possibly do some prototypes, jump through whatever other hoops the client expects from you, write documentation....coding is only one step in the process. Many contractors screw themselves over by estimating TOO LOW because they ignore all the mundane stuff and end up losing money on projects.
I'm not saying all that had to go into this project, but don't assume that just because you can copy and paste some code from the internet in a few hours to do something similar that that was all that went into the work.
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And I drew something with crayons once (Score:2)
Why can't I sell it for the same price as a picasso?
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Because you're not selling to the government, duh.
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Ha! Bunch of losers! (Score:2)
Just downloaded the Android version (Score:5, Interesting)
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Looks fine to me.
Writing an app is the cheap part
Of course, I wouldn't expect someone like you to understand business.
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Industrial strength cluelessness (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the government holds contractors on tight leashes. Contract assignment is being done more and more heavily based upon past performance -- your last few contracts were duds, you're less likely to get the next one.
And yes, there is a lot of time spent on product specs. Full life cycle SDLC. Agile development where is is appropriate. Understanding the target before you write a line of code.
Exactly the opposite of what most of the code monkeys making comments above are used to.
So yes, there will be specs written before the product is architected. And it will be written for maintainability. And it will be tested before release. And yes, during the initial development period, this costs money. Because, and remember this, there isn't revenue built into the back end (it isn't "sold" or "advertising supported") to pay for fixes, rewrites, and handling customer complaints.
Disclaimer: I'm a government contractor. I don't code. I'm part of the analysis, review, and verification process. And I've seen a lot of extremely complex systems go out on time and work well when released.
Code is posted (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a link to the code [osha.gov]
There's probably a reason it's calculating 140F in boston.
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It's making calls to a floating point exponent function for constant powers of 10??
Yes software is expensive to develop (Score:2)
When I worked for the uni I had a group of part time students who spent their time developing in-house apps of different kinds. If you consider that each student costs $20k a year, over a couple of years working on an app and its iterations and versions, that adds up in a hurry. Even free software if you count the time that goes into it, really adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open Source an free software is just a different way of covering the costs.
Maybe the age of quick one-off apps (many
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Only 74999999 more scandals like this to go (Score:2)
(15 trillion / 200 thousand)
Better work fast though.. if you save 20 000 [brillig.com] times as much money per day (4 giga U.S. $), you may actually stay ahead of getting into more debt.
P.S. my joke was going to be 14 trillion, but I saw that in the mean time it has become 15 trillion.
Douglas Hofstadter once wrote something about "innumeracy" I believe.
How much of the waste was due to waste prevention (Score:2)
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You mean like the paper reduction programmes at work that are promoted on printed paper documents?.
The government is no more wasteful than private businesses. The government's excesses are just a lot more visible, and Americans have been trained to hate government while fetishizing business.
Who's astroturfing this story? (Score:4, Interesting)
I see plenty of comments on how reasonable or unreasonable the price is, and they are interesting. I generally agree it doesn't seem that out of whack price wise for a working application supported for some time period.
What I find more interesting is this story is being posted all over the web all of the sudden:
And of course here on /.
Hitting that range of sites (and more) with this sort of non-story story trying to push a narrative of the government is wasting your money? Someone behind the scenes is pushing this narrative, I suspect. Not news for nerds, but manufactured political outrage.
alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper wor (Score:4, Insightful)
alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper work
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Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper (Score:5, Funny)
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$2000 for the apps and $198,000 for the FAR reporting.
Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper (Score:5, Informative)
No. A regular team will set you back around $100k a month: 7 people ($100/hr) just cost 5K daily. That gives you 2 developers, one system engineer, one designer, two testers and one project manager. Two sprints and you've spent the budget.
Re:alot of that cost has to be overhead and paper (Score:5, Funny)
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When you don't need "a regular team", it becomes "overhead".
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Because I could give two shits less about what some private company does with their private money.
My governement, spending my money does peek my interest.
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You should care that your government' s productivity is the same as what you could get from the private company. You should care that the people telling you that government productivity is worse than private business' are lying, depending on private business secrecy and low standards to con you. Because those people are destroying the government that is the only thing protecting you from the private businesses that manufacture these lies.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Funny)
The version with spell checking costs $300K.
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Their interest has peaked. It's all downhill from here, and soon they'll be quite bored.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
I get that many, many people believe that the people belong to the government (hence your post, for instance) but that is dead wrong. The government does not "represent" the people. The people ARE the government. The government's money IS the people's money. You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach. Your attitude is the problem, not the solution.
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If it was in corporate America, whoever authorized it would be fired and the CEO would have some explaining to do to the shareholders. "Nobody" would hear about it since it doesn't really affect anyone.
This, however, is the government wasting everyone's money.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
No, if it was corporate America whoever authorized it would be promoted and the problem would disappear with creative accounting. Anyone who thinks big corporations are less wasteful of money than government has never experienced big corporation life. The government has to put all their dirty laundry out in public, corporations don't.
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If it was corporate America, the company that spent money in this fashion might go out of business. That is how the market works.
Your defense of government is shameless. Your defense of an expense useless app as a "mistake" is indicative of the stupidity of the statist crowd.
I expected nothing less from the Slashdot crowd.
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If it was corporate America, the company that spent money in this fashion might go out of business.
Hahah. No, the company that spent money that way would then proceed to A) pay a PR firm to drive up the value of their stock, B) let the CEOs sell off some of their options, C) dilute the value of their stock D) sell privileged shares to exclusive private investors, E) file for bankruptcy and shaft the stockholders F) emerge from bankruptcy after letting a few executives move on to better paying positions at different companies with lovely severance packages F) find more fools to pour in more "venture capi
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
No, corporate America wastes money like this all the time. You just don't hear about it, because corporate America isn't as transparent or accountable as even the US Federal government. And because the Federal government propaganda about itself can't compare to Corporate America's.
You might have noticed that corporate America got bailed out by the Federal government, and far from the first time. Because corporate America totally blew their business, relying on secrecy and propaganda to get so far wrong before running out of rope.
This app might be far too expensive, but it's not useless. You corporate anarchists ("libertarians") refuse to acknowledge how much many people's lives benefit from things that don't do you specifically any good - but the same is true about benefits to you that others don't need.
And along the same lines you judge the entire government, which is literally millions of times bigger than this project, by its highly visible mistakes. Yet $200K mistakes that are indeed truly worthless are made all day, every day by private businesses. But since you (mostly delusionally) aspire to someday owning your own multimillion dollar corporation, you ignore their tendency to waste with impunity - invisibly.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, and depending on how involved those tasks are, that doesn't sound all that unreasonable, it's just an excuse of politicians to yell about things. Developer churn is about 10-11k/month at the best of times, so 10 'man months' of developer time (3 people for 3 months + some of a manager) gets you pretty close to those numbers. In all of that you have to develop, verify, test, test compliance (accessibility etc.) before you can distribute.
Those figures actually seem pretty reasonable. Not only do you have a 'developer' but you have to have an artist, there's oversight and meeting time to arrange it etc. Oh and since it's a private company, they need to be making moneywhich is probably 10-20 %. +
I'm working on a mobile project right now, where we have 9 'sub modules' of the app, which are done, and we're going to add 3 more across 3 platforms, one for bus location services, one for building room locations, one for exam schedules. The planning for this involved 7 people, (this is for a student project that will be deployed for a production system), two people from ITS, the two course developers/instructor/TA (one of those is me), two people from legal, and security about how we handle some information with students (or don't), and then the undergraduate chair. We've had two meetings already, which if you price it out, for the work done for the meetings plus development time, you're looking at already having spent 10k or so, and we haven't actually got formal requirements, nor have we let students touch a line of code yet. This is going to run, just on our end, about 40-50k, and that's with students doing the actual programming. And we already have art assets to be pulled from our communications department, but those cost money to make too, and the actual services themselves needed to be created (which cost a LOT of money, we're just doing the client).
So in short, that seems about realistic. And that's the problem, people are going to jump up and down and complain, but from what I can tells this seems about reasonable value for money. You may disagree with if the money should have been spent at all (and that's a valid ideological position I suppose), but it doesn't seem like it's that far off base.
Also, I'd kinda like to see the government offer more web and mobile services where appropriate. That might mean that you spend some time on simple stupid things while you learn just what is involved, and as with any spending programme, some things you spend money on will turn out badly. But that's alright.
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I'm fairly certain that there is no way that you could justify 3 people's time for 3 months to write an app that is essentially a interactive PDF viewer that takes some of the thinking out of not being an idiot.
I'm fairly certain you couldn't justify one person spending 3 months if the data was provided already, which it certainly was provided by OSHA themselves. Its not like they had to do any research.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever worked for the government, ever? The reason you know about this at all is because they need a paper trail a Km long. The government cannot, and does not do anything without layers of approvals, analysis, and more approvals. That cost money.
If the government is going to say it, they probably have to run it by an expert. That's a 10k consulting fee for the guy to talk to you.
The 'unfinished' blackberry app is telling at 40k. 40k is the price of getting a sufficiently working prototype, that they can decide it's not worth the next 60k in testing and everything else. And who knows what exactly they prototyped first (which, by the way, I'd still charge you for, whether it goes live or not) and decided it wasn't worth the price. Or that they prototyped for the other versions before concluding they sucked and axed those features. That happens a lot in this business, you get grand ideas, and when you try and do them, they turn out to be bad ideas, and you have to... scale back.
Don't understate the cost of testing here. Especially if you get hit with a platform revision part way through. God help you with government testing. An 'interactive PDF viewer' may have licence requirements, oh wait, did I just say licence? Even if it doesn't, the government has to do due diligence with a lawyer, there goes some money. But back to testing. You have to test platforms, accessibility, multiple OS versions, multiple devices. That costs a LOT of money. I had dinner with a 6 person outfit last week, and they'll charge you 50-60k for a month of testing, mobile or PC. In that time you send them stuff to test, and then you might be sitting around waiting if you have no other contract for them to send back testing metrics, then you iterate, repeat.
What I can write in a day, if it's coming from a company, takes a week, and if it's coming from the government takes a month, since this is a company for the government, it takes a month. That's not necessarily inefficiency, just different priorities. The government absolutely cannot release an app that destroys your phone. I know, I know, it's not doing anything that would destroy your phone. But the government *HAS* to test that, on every version of the code they submit. A small mobile company wouldn't bother to test it at all against some of those things. The government has to at least try and make it accessible, which means hiring a specialist, testing, testing and more testing, revisions revisions and more revisions (and in the end it might fail, so you're still SOL), physical accessibility, etc. etc. etc. Oh and it has to be tested in spanish too.
If the company is handing it off to the government, source or not, all of that was supposed to be documented. In a private company that documentation might be shorter than this post, but someone has to write a 20 page report on it so the Auditor general (here in canada) or the GAO (general accounting office) in the US can verify how the money was spent.
If you actually try out the app (galaxy S II here), it has some location aware services (which don't work in canada, obviously). So someone has had to coordinate with NOAA about the data format and source, because if that changes the whole app breaks. There is a pile of information in it. Sure, the information (and a LOT of pictures) might have been pulled from other sources, but you need to coordinate that with those other sources, get the info, verify it, test it. It also bases it on the heat index it calculates. Simple calculation by itself, but it combines with a lot of information. Every step of development and prototyping of the app needs to be checked and rechecked with OSHA publications on what to do (notably the first aid procedures, identifying heat problems and then the specific recommendations).
Again, it's not 'hard' but it depends on specifics. If someone handed then the 20 or so pages worth of text and diagrams and said 'here, make an app out of it' 200k might be a bit much, but if they had to write t
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure a private company like Eastern Research Group could have done it for much less than that!
That depends on if it was a smart private company. Private companies are there to make money. If someone is waving around a huge fat wad of cash calling for an app, you really need to quote just under that amount, but deliver the best that money can buy for that price. Especially with governments, it isn't about offering the cheapest price (though that does come into it) but often if a budget has already been set and approved, anything under that budget is fair game the b'cats won't flinch. Now, I am not saying sell them a $10 app for $200k, but if you have $200k of development funds to use, give the customer an app that is worth what they paid for it.
This is where truly good companies stand out. If you have a ship of fools running a company, they will likely burn through development costs, making mistakes, paying the wrong developers and end up with a rubbish product. If you have a strong tight company, they will also go through the same budget, but the final product will be fantastic.
The problem is that sometimes it is hard to differentiate the the ship of fools company from the legend company - especially by b'cats who think that a power point presentation is a wonderful way to demo what a final product can do.
Re:wow, a guy made a mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
You have it wrong.
If a budget has been approved, the bureaucrats have an incentive to award the bid that exactly matches the budget, because otherwise next years budget will be cut.
You would be amazed at what gets approved at the end the year of a well run department that is well under budget. (at least I always am.)
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b'cat == Bureaucrat
I abbreviated because that's one of the dozen or so words that I can never remember how to spell correctly, no matter how much I try or how embarrassing it is personally, due to rare use and asinine spelling it always manages to slip through the cracks.
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They almost certainly contracted a private sector business to do this for them, and this was the bill they got.
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Compared to the amounts we've spent on the recent wars.
Show me an iPhone app that can replace a soldier, and maybe we'll get those costs down.
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Compared to the amounts we've spent on the recent wars.
Show me an iPhone app that can replace a soldier, and maybe we'll get those costs down.
Angry Birds?
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By all reasonable metrics, the US government is more effecient then business.
Fell free to read the budgets, projects, reports. Warning: You need to be smart, read for hours without being distracted and do math.
They care a lot about spending, it's just that the media doesn't care a lot about truth.
The post office? is fine. It movies 40% of all mail in the world, and private delivery business use the USPS for delivery becasue it's cheaper and more efficient.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Is there a problem? yes.
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No. Government workers have lost their job at a far higher rate than private workers for years. Government workers compete for promotions just as private workers do. Government workers also know that their job is for the benefit of their country, which is more likely to motivate them than the good of the corporation motivates private workers. Meanwhile private workers are even more likely to be contractors working for both their contracting company and the client company.
You are speaking entirely from ideol