Notes and Translations for the New York Times coverage of healthcare.gov

So 55 separate goverment contractors trying to integrate incredibly nitpicky set of data and it does not work? I wonder why. Maybe first they should have fixed the process. You can't build nationwide websites same way you build physical things.

This is a good rebuttal. That NYT article smelled bad immediately.<p>The other thing that bugs me is when people complain that Obama should have just pulled in his campaign people. Integrating with undocumented, legacy APIS, and strange law-driven requirements is a completely different challenge than the type of still very difficult but free-wheeling and <i>modern</i> integration the campaign people had the freedom to play with.

Could anyone have made this project succeed? Is any IT project of this size destined to fail?<p>What private enterprise projects could compare in scope and size? Google&#x27;s infrastructure? Facebook? Could they have succeeded if they hadn&#x27;t started small?

Now the world runs on software you&#x27;d think the Times could find somebody to intelligently write about it. Or not assume the reader knows nothing -- they don&#x27;t do that for cars.

I just finished &#x27;managing&#x27; the integration of a service API with a web front-end. It was not at all easy to manage and everyone working was in-house.<p>Healthcare.gov has 50(!) contractors supervised by HHS?<p>To fix it they are bringing in &#x27;specialists?&#x27; Someone should send everyone in HHS a copy of the Mythical Man Month.<p>I believe the probability of this thing EVER working are pretty close to zero.