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Comment on Obama administration to end contract with company behind HealthCare.govparent

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The government could have easily paid 10% of what they did to a tech start-up

And when it failed, the government would be criticized for hiring a start-up to do a job that was obviously so enormous that only a big established contractor could take it on. And rightfully so.

And if it failed

Fixed that for you.

Oh, this project would have failed anyway. A lot of the work is integration with backwards systems, in a political environment. Point me at the startup engineers that are interested in working on that.

Sure, a mythical online website built from scratch in Node.js with a Mongo backend can be out together by a bunch of college graduates, but without talking to a dozen other systems this site is not going to do much, and as soon as you take people out of the comfort zone of shiny toys we'll see how long the remain interested when you end up in SOAP and CORBA or are screen scraping mainframes. The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.

... The people willing to tolerate this mess don't generally intersect with the startup crowd.

But this is a space that could be disrupted (albeit not easily). And isn't Clever[1] trying to do something similar in the education space?

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/clever-y-combinator-student-i...

I think thats unfair.

Interaction with legacy systems is all the future has left, plus its a problem - and the most elegant hack to scrape the aging DoJ mainframe wins the prize.

No, its clear public data architecture has to change.

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