Posted on 11/29/2011 5:53:31 PM PST by Swordmaker
This is a tale of massive waste in a tiny little corner of a tiny little department of the US Government, how it came to light and a few small suggestions about what could be done about it.
Getting Hot in Here
I'm not quite sure how I stumbled onto it, but I found that OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor) have an Android application. The purpose of the application is to provide information about the heat index and the corresponding safety warnings. Essentially, it is a temperature converter, it converts a temperature into a safety level. Being an Android developer myself, I wanted to give it a try to see how it handled.
It's a steamy pile of sh!t.
Lookin' good.
Pardon my French, but I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn't actually capable of the function it is supposed to do. When I first tried the application, it told me that it was currently 140F in Boston. It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way. If I had to reproduce it, I'd say that it would take be about 6 hours at the maximum. At my hourly rate of $100, that's $600. Now, the quality of the product didn't surprise me a huge amount - I don't ever expect very much from the federal government.
Still, I was curious about how much we taxpayers payed for the program - and it knocked me off my feet.
(Excerpt) Read more at gun.io ...
WARNING... BAD LANGUAGE ... WARNING!
Entirely justified, in my opinion...
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LOL, I’m with the author on his assessment if I were to build it, a good 6 hours development time max X $100-$125/hour. Add in some follow up time for testing and support... For $200K, they should have gotten a whole suite of apps that do more than provide data that can be pulled from a RSS feed.
Me three... this is a $200,000 do nothing App. What frosts me even more is it is a UK business that got the geld and not a US business. What happened to buy American, even if it is an American company ripping us off?
They think that you don't care about how it "feels" to the radiators??? Why you uncaring mechanic, you! For shame! Couldn't you just put a muffler on it... Isn't that what mufflers are for? To keep the car warm in winter?
When I was in the USAF in Montana the coldest “temperature” without any wind that I saw was -38 F. My 67 dodge pickup truck started. I didn’t even have an engine block heater and it was parked outside.
You're right, that was heartless. I guess my bushings have just hardened with age.
So, the government has spent $111,600 and have the application in hand. Now they have to pay a reliable company to field test the application, accept or reject it as meeting the original specification, and if they accept it, to train the the trainers in how to use it. Considering all the presentation and training material that will be generated, that's probably going to cost about $100,000 but can be limited by limiting the number of trainers that are initially trained.
Someone will probably get a bonus for keeping the total delivered price below $250,000 which would have put it into a different category and would have driven the cost up even further. Now as for it not working and the interface being crap, that's not an issue unless the specification required that it work and the interface not be crap. If the friendly professor they hired hadn't specified software much there's a good chance that no such specific requirement was included. Live and learn, of course, and after specifying a few he'll get the hang of it and be an even friendlier professor as well. Those agencies that really care about getting quality software the first time pay friendly professors who have retired from the agency that is seeking the software product. In this case, someone figured it was so trivial they'd let a new guy have a shot and you saw the result.
Regards
I bet a brand new Volt would not have started.
I have had three of the old Dodges. My favorite was a ‘76 mil-spec Power Wagon. All 318s, never saw -38, but they
started down to -18. I didn't buy one of them below 100,000 miles.
It would be ironic if its use led to repetitive motion injuries — and given the opaque organization of all gov’t websites, odds are good.
Have the right oil for temps like that and it is supposed to start. Have the wrong oil and it won’t crank.
Local government is just as idiotic. I worked for a major city's IT department. The police department contracted a private firm to create software for laptops in their police cars, at a cost of hundreds of thousands. I went through their training course alongside police officers, as a liaison to the police from the IT department. It was a piece of crap, and it took me five minutes on a police laptop to bypass it's security and corrupt the server and take administrative control. Not a good thing for protection of criminal databases. Needless to say, I embarassed them.
// Created by mkeefe on 8/4/11.Leaving the copyright notice (autogenerated by the xcode development tool) as-is was probably an oversight by the initial developer but should have been caught by someone up the food chain.
// Copyright 2011 PixelBit Inc. All rights reserved.
Mine had a 318 engine too. There was so much room under the hood because it was made to hold a 440 if you chose it. Of course my 318 only got from 7.5 - 11 mpg. Good thing I had 3 fuel tanks on it that held over 60 gallons in total.
A 60 gallon capacity may be good for range but it’s he’ll on your bank account!
Back then (’77 - ‘78) gas was in the 50 to 60 cent a gallon range. Still painful on an E2 salary though.
So, the boss went to the store and paid a few bucks for the model out of his own pocket, and used it a day or two later to explain the problem to his boss in Washington. My brother said that if he had had to get the model through channels, it would have taken weeks, and would have cost hundreds of dollars. Because of a system which is designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.
Liberals went orgasmic when they found out that Grumman made ash trays and charged the government $600 apiece for them. Waste! Fraud!! Abuse!!!
In reality, of course, the paperwork alone to establish permission to put an additional piece in a military aircraft, anywhere for any reason, costs money. You add an ash tray to a dozen planes or fewer, in this case, and it is absurd to suppose that you could possibly design, gain approval, make, and install those ash trays for less than $600 for each. In fact, it turns out that there were sports cars whose manufacturer charged more than that for an ash tray!
In this present case, I'd imagine that nearly all of the cost went into overhead, and time of people who were being underutilized worrying about trifles. But just one court case would surely vindicate having all your i's dotted and your t's crossed. If you use the OSHA temperature work safety app on your iPhone, you can presumably use that fact as a defense in court if ever one of your employees suffers from heat stroke. That just might make it worth it, right there.
Making no representation that I question whether a competent developer could not, using the existing app as a model, create a much nicer app in a week's time . . .
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