The Worst Website Launch of All Time

[@itsnumpty]

The fact they brought in experts after spaghetti code was written for years and they fixed it in such a short time says a lot about their planning and competence.

[@karmatraining]

I found this quite striking too. The difference between a vast bureacracy and an actual, functioning coding shop with decent engineers and not too much red tape is night & day.

[@andrewallbright]

This is a plot point in Shin Godzilla (2016). I think about that movie a lot as a software engineer and as a citizen of the US.

[@ogredev]

I got to be part of this effort and man it was a train wreck. One of their "solutions" to fixing db connection deadlocks was to perform dirty reads with NOLOCK directives. Their upper management team was the best part. Having such little experience with dev teams and doing nothing but creating bottlenecks for the devs, they were often left out of the loop on purpose. Yeah I got years of horror stories working with these guys.

[@BTrain-is8ch]

@@karmatraining Beyond a certain size most software producing shops become vast bureaucracies. Decent engineers and not too much red tape is a state that tends to vanish somewhere around the point where the engineering department's headcount goes beyond 10-20. The whole story has all the hallmarks of basically any software project at your run of the mill mid to large sized enterprise organization.

[@timmy7201]

I've worked on two government funded projects myself, as a software engineer. Both went ... well ... terrible. There are just to many upper and middle-managers in our governments bureaucracy. All these people search purpose in their job, whilst there isn't one. So they fill their days with meetings and more meetings, these meetings result in new ideas, which result in project change requests. All these change requests result in a dev-team that goes in endless circles, without any progress at all. Due to this lack of progress, the client and/or government officials lose fate in the engineering team. This results in a massive increase of government bureaucracy, which just roadblocks the dev-team to a complete stop. Which result in less progress, which in return results in less trust, which results in more bureaucracy, etc ... The slower things go, the more the government officials start making their own decisions, the worse the project becomes...

[@timmy7201]

As a software engineer, I've worked on a bunch of government funded projects. The last project was rather small, so I estimated that it would take 2 to 3 months to deliver. The project required a specific type of IOT wireless access point, which wasn't yet installed. So we scheduled a meeting with government officials, in order to discuss an optimal installation point for this new antenna. They agreed to install the antenna themselves, so we continued developing the backend of the project. We completed the dev-work in less than two months, ahead of time. So we contacted the city officials, to share pairing codes for the antenna. They informed us that the antenna hadn't been deployed yet, so we had to wait. We contacted them 1 month later, same story. Again 2 months later, still no antenna. Another three months passed, still no antenna. We called them back after 6 months, begging to deploy those IOT devices to free up some office space. Explaining that we could active them remotely, once they installed the antenna. They agreed, we deployed the IOT devices, then everyone forgot about the project. It took the government 2.5 years in total, to install the antenna. Which is about an equivalent amount of work, as installing an wifi AP. They then asked for a financial compensation, claiming that we delivered the project two years behind schedule. A government funded project, in a nutshell... KEEP AWAY!!!

[@WantedForTwerking]

Yup sounds WAY too familiar, never again, thats for sure.

[@meghanachauhan9380]

arre you kidding? Almost every single government contractor I've seen over quotes the living hell out of everything. A 600 worth equipment costs 6000, 6000 costs 60000. They just pay the officials in charge and the tax agencies and the officials don't care either. I mean it's not their money, it's public money and how many people even bothered to read the constitution? People kill each other for government contracts because they're legal licenses to steal. After all if everything's public money and the public doesn't care.....

[@cones914]

did the company pay compensation?

[@timmy7201]

@@cones914 No! The company I worked for had a long enough paper trail, to proof they where not in fault.

[@leiregyp5814]

@@timmy7201 good, its absolutely sad to see how a government is so good at wasting money then blames it on others

[@napoleonVT]

"They didn't document anything, but that's pretty standard, we can give them a pass" I've never been more insulted by something I completely agree with.

[@peterdieleman303]

Industry standard practice.

[@pharoah327]

I HATE that this is true. Ever tried to continue a project made by another team? When you have no contact with that team and no code is commented plus no diagrams or any documentation is given, good freaking luck! I just got finished with a project like that. It was hell.

[@fredjones5698]

@@peterdieleman303the great thing about this industry standard practice is that it actually applies to all industries ever. No one ever documents shit. Humans are lazy

[@Powderlover1]

That’s a lot of extra work

[@PytoCode]

​@@Powderlover1 Ik tried a project with documentation and figured it would be better have way through to do restart without docs

[@vittordecastro3815]

As any government project they were leaning towards the oldest platform they could find 😂😂

[@lightning_11]

Why is this so true?

[@swizzler]

@@lightning_11 Crotchety project managers high up that refuse to learn new things. The type of people that here in 2023 still insist on running Windows XP and ignore all the shit that breaks because they are doing that. I have dealt with people like that and it's miserable, but they're everywhere. There is also a type of project manager that will only allow a technology to be used if they understand it, but they are also an idiot, so you're stuck building rocket ships with Duplo Blocks.

[@alexandruilea915]

@@lightning_11 Because they usually need to support some old shit that is still in use on the government computers.

[@raptoress6131]

Our public healthcare providers went with MUMPS...

[@lightning_11]

@@alexandruilea915 (It was supposed to be a joke... |0| )

[@evanbelcher]

This project took 3 years. I genuinely feel that if they hired a single skilled full-stack engineer, a graphic designer, and a ux designer, paid them good money for those 3 years, and gave them access to domain experts to set the requirements, they could have easily cruised to the finish line on this.

[@NodokaHanamura]

But that would require Government contracts to not, y'know, be bloated clusterfucks that only upper management would love.

[@randyekrer431]

i mean, functionality wise, yes, it would work better. but the tech requirement sheet they provide would be prob 2000 pages, given the bureaucratic crap, so f that shit.

[@syte_y]

A friend of a friend worked on healthcare.gov. I think the level of effort is being severely underestimated. The requirements kept changing because the people having the project built didn’t even know what they were building.

[@alexwakeman8321]

You expect the government to do something correctly? That's a high bar

[@tahaak]

Every time I hear about such projects, how long they took and how expensive they were I‘m thinking to myself that I could have done it in a third of the time for 100 times cheaper and it would work better. Sometimes I feel that the government deliberately does everything wrong in software projects.

[@lucaspepe7294]

"The production launch is the end-to-end testing". It gives me the same vibe as the meme of the dog that says everything is fine while sitting in a house on fire. 🤣

[@narnigrin]

That line gave me a literal cold sweat for a second. When I hear that from a superior in my line of work it's my signal that it's time to polish my LinkedIn profile

[@akshaypendyala]

😂😂😂

[@Mavendow]

They thought they were a gaming startup. Unfortunately, EA wasn't looking to buy and destroy a health insurance website.

[@pyromancy8439]

Once in a while I entertain myself by pushing untested code straight into production. By "untested" I don't mean not tested for security, bugs or load capacity, I mean I'm not even sure it compiles.

[@Dalamain]

Seriously you make some of the best software documentaries, I love it!

[@robschn]

For real! They're my fave

[@gblargg]

They're goofy funny even the silly animations are full of technical details. And plenty of explosions.

[@semicolontransistor]

The US visa application website, also crated by CGI, is probally the worst website I ever had to deal with. It has a number of pages which you would need to complete for the applicaion, however they have an extreamly short time out of maybe 5 minutes or so before they would boot you out of the system. Although you can save your progress, saving is only possible once an entire page is completed. It was extreamly furstrating when you go dig though the draws for a document needed to complete a question near the end of a page, only to return to see that the system has timed out and anything filled in on that page is lost. It has gotten to the point that I re-entered questions for a page so-many times due to the time out that I memorized the entire page.

[@milesmartig5603]

@@Rubicola174 or make it open source so that others don't have to choose between endless suffering or paying money for a 3rd party app just to apply for a visa. Or the government could make the improvement, but whatever.

[@sebastiancarreira5832]

That's very possibly by design thought. Make it as hard as possible to apply for a visa, you will have to give less visas.

[@meghanachauhan9380]

@@milesmartig5603 hey it's not my fault your elected government is dumber than a 12 year old. Now pay up

[@baumdf9134]

Are you sure you were applying for a visa and hadn't stumbled upon the time trial mode of visa simulator 9000

[@ogonbio8145]

i woulda made an ahk script to jiggle my cursor or something

[@andrewchang7194]

It’s funny how it took hundreds of people to build this and still fuck it up, but nowadays, this is probably a system design question for an entry level position at a tech company lol

[@xplinux22]

That was an astounding trainwreck from beginning to end! I lived in Singapore for a few years prior 2020, and I was spoiled by the quality and slick interfaces of all the government technology over there, created by their in-house SWE agency GovTech. Everything from the SingPass app (for national ID and SSO) to their tax portal was extremely solid and modern looking, rivaling most commercial apps. It's so fucking sad how far behind the US government is, when it comes to software engineering.

[@johnpaulgeorgeringo2329]

Yeah, I don't know why most of their resources goes to weapons and wars

[@REAL-UNKNOWN-SHINOBI]

​@@johnpaulgeorgeringo2329It's so that the United States government can bully other governments into loving them. Even though it just shows that you are corrupt a****** who will use violence and force to make friends.

[@holy3979]

It's mostly down to how our government is structured here in the states. It's structured in such a way that making changes takes a very long time and a lot of political will, for both good or bad. This prevents a single administration from abusing power, however at the same time it means that the government lags far behind when it comes to modern rapidly developing technologies.

[@xplinux22]

@@holy3979 I'm not so sure about that. Both NASA and NOAA do some incredible engineering and scientific work today, and so does the DoD when it comes to aerospace and IT (just look at the invention of GPS and the early Internet for past examples), but somehow, the US just sucks hard at software. *EDIT:* Forgot to mention NIST, the NSA, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory as prime examples of the US government successfully developing and standardizing some incredibly advanced computer tech, e.g. Tor, Ghidra, and several key cryptography standards.

[@Lightningflamingice]

@@xplinux22 This is probably because of how good the software industry is in the US. It's not the US public that sucks at SWE, it's the US gov't, and the reason for that is that the gov't can't afford to match the good compensation a tech company will provide, which leads to all the talented people (both in technical and non-technical skills like communication and management) being drained towards private industry. Like you said, NASA and NOAA are top-notch, and that's because for the top-notch hardware engineers, these are some of the best places you can work at because only government can afford the high upfront costs to doing things like maintaining a successful aerospace program.

[@ttuurrttlle]

This is very interesting, but I feel like I still have no clue how this actually could have happened on the ground. Like yeah, there was no decisive leadership, stupid managerial practices, old technology, changing requirements... it does sound like a perfect storm for things to go badly, except that's kinda par for the course in professional software development. It does sound like everyone managing it was at fault from contractors to government officials because of various bad decisions and the project was a nightmare to work on. It sounds like everything boiled down to terrible management, but I'm still sorta surprised about how that happened to such an important project. It's not like the federal government hasn't made working websites before... I would have liked to see more specifically how that GUI-generated code played a part, cause I can see that being a problem. I've definitely felt restrained and exasperated by bad code I could not change.

[@asii_k]

I'm curious about the out of control db queries too, think I'll check the report and see if it has anymore details on that

[@shimadabr]

Incompetence compounds over time.

[@jkf16m96]

The main problem is almost always the management. If they tell you "this project is going to use X" you tell them "X is truly outdated and almost no one uses it" and they just shush you. Well, no one knows about X and now the whole team has to learn X with outdated documentation or lost documentation. This has happened to me a few times, when a boss asked me to use X or Y, I told him how outdated it was, then everything just slow downs a lot because there is hardly documentation and just some online posts from 2009 or 2010

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

This is basically just what happens when there isn't leadership. The point of a leader is to make sure everyone is working together to achieve the end goal, not doing their own thing based on their own version of the end goal that doesn't fit together at the end. (Continuous integration and testing are just two specific technical mechanisms that ensure everyone's pieces fit together)

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

@@asii_k I assume it's just the N+1 queries problem: because you put more effort in making the code "clean" than fast, you have a "get whatever from database" function and the only way to get 100 whatevers is to call it 100 times instead of asking the database for all 100 whatevers at the same time.

[@AndreiTache]

As someone who doesn't know anything about web dev, I find it so ridiculous how over complicated everything seems to be. There is no way a basic webpage and form colector should require 50 services built by 10 different teams

[@LKRaider]

They obviously needed wEbScALe !

[@robinspanier7017]

as a webdev i can say: no, it realy does not. projects like this would be solvable by a single team. the decisions made along the way were the problem. i have seen it myself. a little change from 50 shown characters to 500 can easily cost 100k when you have badly written software, no way of testing, different contractors that are not willing to help you and multiple instances of ppl having to accept the execution of the change. whats even worse is that the good players quit at this point and all left is a bunch of losers operating.

[@parabolicpanorama]

most of any modern website you use is built with many different libraries written by developers all over the world. no one writes the whole thing themselves because someone else has written some piece of code and it's much better than you could hope to. it's easier and smarter to just integrate that into your workflow. a "basic" modern looking web page would be a pain to write all from scratch, especially if you want to serve many different people.

[@MrSquishles]

worked on it a few years after the time period in this video, long story short it's not that simple, hundreds of thousands of lines of backend code levels of not that simple.

[@AndreiTache]

@@parabolicpanorama But why would it be such a pain to write it from scratch? Sure, for some things you really should use libraries, but you can't overuse them (or worse, make the project only by linking libraries together), because you can get boxed in and are unable to change certain functions without breaking everything. With purpose built code, you also have the advantage of designing the system in the most optimal way for what you're trying to achieve, so even if your code isn't as fully optimised, it could still be faster if it is less bloated with unnecesary features, right?

[@leodler]

That Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight logo just doesn't sit right with me lol

[@kevinfaang]

its fake (I couldn't find a real logo) 😔

[@radiosification]

What time in the video is that at? I couldn't spot it

[@davidddisjesus]

@@radiosification I managed to find it at 0:53, it's the logo on the right

[@radiosification]

@@davidddisjesus Ahh I see it, thank you

[@MCasterAnd]

You should really do a video on when Helse Midt (Norway's healthcare organization that covers the middle area of Norway) chose to change their journal system. They started with a bidding process. All vendors welcome. Pretty early in the bidding process however they decided to disqualify DIPS, who was delivering the same journal system to Helse Sør-Øst, Helse Nord and Helse Vest - the three other govt. healthcare organizations in Norway. Yes, they really disqualified the one piece of software that was used literally everywhere else. Who did they go with? Well, good'old american EPIC - and they chose to call the new system "Helseplatformen". Did it go well? NOPE. It has been a shitshow from day one. Most notably, 16 000 critical letters to patients were discovered to not have been delivered, which delayed a whole boatload of appointments and also put some patients lives at risk (Helseplatformen blamed this on user error - yes, really, 16 000 missing letters was the result of a user error made by several hundred users was to blame on the users, not the system). After this, the director of Helseplatformen stepped down due to the huge wave of criticism following the reveal of these issues. One doctor actually saved a patient life after being unsure about wether or not a letter was sent. He asked a colleague to directly contact the patient to ensure he got the information he needed. The patient had a blood clot. Had the hospital not reached out to him directly, he could have died. Currently, 44 individual cases have been confirmed where patients have not received the help they needed in time, directly as a result of Helseplatformen. In a survey conducted among the staff of one of Helse Midt's largest hospitals, 27% of the nurses were considering quitting due to the issues. The feature for referring patients to another hospital, which is a critical feature of any hospital journal system, was non-existent when the system was first implemented. After several months this feature was finally implemented, but it caused a massive amount of manual labour for the hospital staff - who are already understaffed. Some hospital directors are quoted in meetings discussing the backlash from doctors and healthcare workers as "echo chambers", "hate groups" and "whining from angry doctors" - which isn't really helping the issue. The healthcare on their side are claiming that they are providing the directors with "constructive criticism" about legitimate issues with the system. In addition, the price for the new system has increased by 35%, from 3.7 billion kroner to 5 billion kroner - and it has been implemented in less than half of the healthcare institutions in the region. UX/UI wise it's also a complete mess. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever seen in modern times. If you search for Helseplatformen on google you can see their take on inputting a date/time in the system. It's a complete scandal. Now, a ton of doctors and healthcare workers have protested against Helseplatformen - with some healthcare institutions outright refusing to change to the new system, instead opting to use the old one. In the meantime Helse Sør-Øst, Nord and Vest are looking at this and wondering why the hell they didn't go with DIPS, so they could all use the same system and be able to share journals across all hospitals...

[@tangiblewaves3581]

Really awful story 😢 but quite frequent the way how federal software projects work. It's a real mess, and I wonder why nothing is learned from this. There are brilliant tech companies out there making immensely powerful systems; why can't this knowledge not be brought into federal software??? 🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️

[@Sammysapphira]

Wow I don't think I've ever seen a worse ui. The date input looks like what a day 3 high-school student would make in a programming class.

[@macmarc6661]

Can anyone share a link to the date picker lmao

[@ThomasNimmesgern]

That's the Hell in HELLseplattformen. 😮

[@MHX11]

Your humor with the editing is amazing

[@TheRossMadness]

Everything that happened in this scenario is covered in "The Phoenix Project". That book still holds up and I wish more people in our government would read it.

[@TheShnitzel]

Man, you're a really great storyteller and your videos are truly awesome. I'm glad I randomly stumbled into this channel. You deserve way more recognition! As an engineer myself I find these videos very interesting and valuable. Keep 'em coming!

[@xorxpert]

as an independent fullstack developer, this was absolutely depressing to watch

[@vincentvanhoven3486]

Delaying security testing to 6 months after launch? So, 6 months for malicious parties to exploit any possible vulnerabilities. That seems pretty bad.

[@probag8414]

Do the Phoenix Pay System next! You want horror story nightmare, that's the place to find one.

[@MrSquishles]

happen to also have en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGI_Inc. working on it? i went through a few years getting on gov contracts after them, lot of clown code.

[@douglasmasho2324]

Meanwhile an Indian KZbinr can casually build that in a week

[@AshutoshBaghel]

Maybe like a college project

[@Core533]

Fr

[@GbpsGbps-vn3jy]

In our country there was the same hi-tech attempt to enable parents to enroll their children in kindergartens. It was fiasco, system was down on day one, and every second kid was not in the lists. At it repeats each year :D

[@XxHomerSimpson91xX]

One of the most underrated KZbin content creator. Hilarious and really informative!

[@Stealth86651]

These videos are awesome, thank you so much for making these. Was also thinking, I'd be totally down to listen to this via podcast as well, but that's a lot of extra work on what I imagine is already a ton of work. Thanks again, the effort/content is really appreciated.

[@syte_y]

I feel like the all star team had an advantage where the business rules were more well understood. If you talk to a vendor who doesn’t even understand the project how could they possibly convey it to you to build. Also involving so many teams is just awful. Makes comms so much more difficult. The government likes over complicating anything.

[@nwrocketman6438]

This is an excellent video. Keep up the good work!

[@Hazanko83]

An entire 6 people were able to successfully sign-up on day 1? 100% guaranteed at least SOMEONE got fired for making the system too easy to use.

[@abhaynath5833]

It was only 1 person who made six different accounts. He was Chuck Norris 😂😂

[@karmatraining]

You should do one of these on the Queensland Healthcare Payroll systems debable. Similar amount of money was wasted, maybe more, and it took down a whole State government here in Australia. Absolutely great business case study on how NOT TO run an IT project.

[@jhonyortiz5]

This video is great. Love the style. I really appreciate that it's still going into depth to an extent but trying to keep it accessible.

[@karstenkunneman5219]

I'm not a web developer, so maybe this is a stupid question, but how could a website whose only purpose is to allow people to buy insurance cost nearly a billion dollars, let alone the nearly half a billion dollar original budget?

[@tylerpeterson4726]

I think it was all the change requests. If leadership says to do A, then later says A is wrong, do B, then all the money spent making A was wasted.

[@DamianTheFirst]

I'm not a dev (yet) but I guess it's not only a website. The website is what user sees but devs also need to create an entire backend. It's similar to frontoffice and backoffice - as a customer you'll never see backoffice but it is needed to provide smooth operation. Such service relies on authentication based on some gov't services and needs to register your actions in another gov't service. Yet (as a noob) I still believe that the budget for this could be at least 5x lower and it would be sufficient for creating a decent system. It's just too many managers taking too high wages for what they are doing (i.e. creating chaos and disruption)

[@alemswazzu]

It's the Government. "Other people, spending other people's money on other people". Plus I believe the contract was given to a friend of Michelle Obama's, not a well known tech company. No website, should ever even cost close to that much money.

[@AmrXcellent]

welcome to gov inefficiencies... think how many gov employees were hired for how much time and how many sub contractors were involved and how many times these requirements were changed. Also bringing in top tier talent, doubling resources, ... all these things last min cost more. Not to mention that the amount mentioned doesn't mentioned what is really covered. it could be the cost for the website for 5-8yrs with support and staff. Again, not justifying the ridiculous amount of $ for what essentially is a website (and not a very complicated one at that) - it is not like a brokerage that needs to do transactions in real time or an airline booking website that needs to search from airlines in realtime from all over the world and be responsive.

[@REAL-UNKNOWN-SHINOBI]

Why I don't get it why did they have to rebuild the damn website from the first one. The first one they had worked. Just because it didn't let you put in payment information or sign up doesn't really matter, you're going to have to call the insurance company anyways when something doesn't work correctly. For a website that was supposed to make getting health insurance easy was an extremely difficult task and a big waste of time, and just convinced people just to shop around by calling everyone that they knew and to use Google and reddit.

[@Michael-ri8sg]

"They slept in nearby hotels, while working 24 hour shifts" 🤣

[@mc.ivanov]

As an software engineer specialised in putting down fires, your channel is just the best. Thank you.

[@shimadabr]

Wow, doubling the headcount with 3 months to deliver the project. Understandable, it's not like that's a well documented mistake since the 70's or something... haha

[@mikadopen4809]

Software Design teacher showed this too our class as a case study and bad example, keep up the good work!

[@BryceCain-b6t]

Love these videos. Been waiting for you to upload again.

[@mr.familiar1136]

Wow, Terremark was the most efficient one in this whole story and all they did was double it and give it to the next person.

[@dybdab]

Please make more of these type of videos.

[@atirutwattanamongkol8806]

The amount of miscommunications here is even more amazing than Operation Viking

[@skyhappy]

Your meme game is god tier...I kneel

[@ES-cf4ph]

Love how his voice is so monotone. It's like the computers would laugh about these incidents

[@alexisdamnit9012]

I work at a big government contractor (formerly a data scientist at a tech company). I can confirm that government contractors are as ineffective and inefficient and bureaucratic as government agencies. It’s really bad. People here barely know how to write code.

[@oliverford5367]

As Joel Spolsky said, non-technical people managing software projects is like a non-surfer relying on their advisors standing on the shore to tell them what to do. Project managers are necessary to make decisions, but they need to know the domain. Linus Torvalds could be an ordinary dev, but he focuses on managing the whole Linux kernel. His job is to make the technical decisions and give the implementation to trusted, competent people. But an MBA who wasn't a programmer wouldn't understand the decisions that need to be made, so would come unstuck unless someone technical is really in charge.

[@VincentSaelzler]

Love that the investigation from the government actually got put to use as a reference for this video!

[@nomadshiba]

6:10 yeah of course, more people means more code right, should be faster "we did the hard part already by thinking what it should look like, you just have to code it out, easy. we did all the thinking already"

[@Spokeek]

I love the way you tell those tech stories. Really cool to follow

[@xcloudx01alt]

"We'll fix it at launch" > only 6 sign ups and servers are dead "how could this happen?!"

[@aaaaanh]

imagine being the country that has the (in)famous silicon valley but fails to build a website

[@tomhekker]

I’ve never heard of Marklogic until this vid and I am in software development for 20+ years, had to learn it exists from this vid 😂

[@FlorianWendelborn]

13:00 I was thinking you meant 464k... that’s the worst 400M ever spent...

[@Paulo27]

I thought he meant 4.64 million but then he said 58 million... What in the fuck is all this.

[@kv4648]

Classic us gov lmao. They need to actually hire people other than dinosaurs there

[@tylerpeterson4726]

Why wouldn't you want to hire someone who brags about 30 years of experience in a technology that's been obsolete for 25 years? You would hate to waste such valuable experience!

[@sill]

you're my favorite new channel.

[@whatthepick]

A work of blood sweat and tears that the A Team did singlehanded more less in a 1/16th of the time

[@nomadshiba]

i like how government just throws money and scales the hardware of dumpster fire code

[@pyrotechnick420]

I bet those 6 people who were able to sign up on day 1 were only able to do so bc they were the first 6 people to submit their applications before the system crashed

[@RudhinMenon]

Lack of experience, corporate greed and incompetence, all in one project. I feel for the front line workers, all those sleepless nights to clean up after what was done by the leadership. Pity it still happens in numerous other projects as well.

[@hadipawar2539]

2 years for a an account creation popup that doesn't even work is exactly how i imagine govt projects would work.

[@ThePowerofElectricity]

I think the real MVP here is TerraMark. "Double literally all our hardware in 3 days" --- "Sure thing boss, aaand done!"

[@RobertoFornaro]

This channel satisfies an inner IT Schaudenfreude which is hard to explain

[@mawcus7132]

Your videos are dank AF. Keep up the great work🤙

[@puzzlepuzzlepuzzle760]

How does this channel not have more views and subs is strange to me

[@SaudBako]

This video is scarier than most horror movies lately.

[@SZF123456]

You couldn’t pay me enough to be a project manager especially in the government holy shit

[@blaketomlinson3915]

your visuals during any of your videos are amazing and hilarious!😂

[@yewcookies]

What? Business side constantly changing requirements resulted in mishmash code? Imagine that!

[@Weltbummler23]

The production launch is the end to end testing… gosh that brings back bad memories 🤢

[@whyme943]

Could be shops to do a video on Canada’s Phoenix Pay system

[@fazzitron]

That joke about to documentation got me 😂

[@OldestHouse]

the CS channel i always wanted

[@arjix8738]

If like 3-4 devs with actual experience worked on this w/o any framework, I bet they could have finished way earlier.

[@5.43v]

Less people means less confusion

[@yoavmor9002]

"If you think it's expansive to hire professionals just wait until you hire amateurs" - Sone guy on the internet who probably got it from someone else

[@ZeCatable]

Your org chart with tenure as free text field, fav food and color, SSN for each employee: "Y0L0!" - Every information system specialist out there: "Noooooooooooooooooooo~"

[@thunder____]

I'm simply baffled by the excessive database queries. Like, did dev leadership forget that RAM exists for them to use to hold values as variables? Were they querying the database every time they needed to access data? I've literally only been working with SQL part-time for about three months and even I know better. The only reason I can think of that might justify those excessive queries is if they're running on servers with lightning-fast CPUs and pathetically little RAM, and even then, the far better and far more obvious solution is to just use better servers. Also, wtf made them think NoSQL was inherently more scalable? Sure, for some applications, a schema is overly restrictive, but for some applications, a schema provides immensely valuable structure to the data, and since, as the video indicates, NoSQL is a catch-all for a variety of data structures that work pretty differently from each other, the fact that they decided they "needed" NoSQL without knowing what kind of NoSQL they needed just screams "I got hired to lead this project as a favor to my wealthy political donor parents, I'm not actually a software engineer". I sure hope the over-budget funding we ponied up went straight into the pockets of the hard-working programmers who pulled 24-hour shifts to make this thing work; the incompetent leadership didn't deserve a cent beyond their original contract, and if the leaders continued to get paid after the Oct 1, 2013, launch date, that raises some serious questions about whether or not they actually intended to provide a working product on time (or at all).

[@garzdiva]

It's dead easy to generate excessive queries in a big system. A system where no one communicates with each other and many lack technical competence like this? That increases exponentially. You need A, okay, make a DB call. Oh you also need B from this function, let's call it. But that function is actually making 5 calls to return B to you. Now, you need C, and C can actually be retrieved along B in that earlier function call, but you don't know that, or can't figure out how to retrieve C alongside B, so you make a call only for C. Do this enough times, in enough abstraction layers, and you end up making 100x the calls you need. Then you also have shit like operations that can be combined in a transaction, but are being done sequentially in separate calls.

[@TigreXspalterLP]

Let me introduce you to in house frameworks with custom orm, which will haunt you in your dreams.

[@alemswazzu]

Pretty sure they had a relationship with Michelle Obama. Just corruption.

[@FrozenMilkOnACloudyDay]

Your videos are fantastic, cant wait for more

[@FlabbyTabby]

People: Haha, government disorganised, private companies better. Private companies: Even more disorganised

[@LeTtRrZ]

The first half or so of this video is the story of my entire QA career.

[@BC-tp8ep]

When doing IT contracting and consulting to the government incompetence pays.

[@GeneralNuisance00]

God i would kill for an analysis from you on the gong show that is the Phoenix payroll system. It is basically everything covered here, but dumber, and it takes place in CGI's homeland of Canada.

[@fernandoschuindt1665]

You just described the average software development experience. Most of the stories won't change much, some will even be worse. That kinda helps to explain the recent decline of the IT job market.

[@_orangutan]

I could have built that site for 100K at least within a year with only 3 engineers. Total clownery.

[@underTheStorm]

how to find videos similar to this where you learn about successful projects and failures?

[@CraftMine1000]

So, they overwrote each others changes in the vcs, now that, usually takes a bit of effort, like, most vcss' warn you every step of the way when you attempt to do that, usually red text saying things along the line of "local blah blah is not up to date, are you sure?" and "this will overwrite/void/delete commits" and "these changes cannot be undone" So yeah, smh

[@RSZA011]

I love your channel !! such incredible content . MOAR!!!!

[@raylopez99]

Probably teen coders running PHP could have made this work...or my favorite, Silverlight in the front end, and C# using Linq-to-Sql and IIS on the backend. For a billion dollars I'm sure you could buy enough hardware to make it work.

[@nekoboi_pl]

I remember how police in poland sent sms to everyone with link to their site, you couldn't connect to it because of too much requests XD

[@reset5899]

love these meme videos and how they incorporate cyber security carry on the videos pls

[@vvidalftw]

I had to subscribe to your channel. Definitely top notch IT content HAHAHA

[@ohioplayer-bl9em]

The launch of the website was exactly how the entire ACA went and is still going. It’s a pos law

[@notyourbusiness2672]

Worth to know: making the bottom part of a thumbnail red - makes it look like the video has already been watched, even if it was not.

[@johnbrownell1]

The way he showed scrum omfg I’m dying 😂

[@ch3ragCS]

Changing requirements b/w sprints is worst thing ever

[@Raven-fu1zz]

I tried healthcare gov like half a year ago when I became broke, they just ran me in circles for several months, and eventually they just went quiet, no paperwork no emails, nothing, I didn't ever get insurance or anything, they just stopped talking and stopped taking my calls

[@WolfrostWasTaken]

What the hell why would they choose this Mark thing when MongoDB literally exists

[@RawShogun]

I like the way you explain things, I feel so smrt now.

[@_a_x_s_]

Damn it. I was just listening to this as a joy and it became more and more an insult to me for what I was doing during my work...

[@REAL-UNKNOWN-SHINOBI]

They should have stuck with the functioning website that they had in the first damn place.

[@MrRobertX70]

I love the humor in your videos! 👋

[@nzspambot]

Should do the Australia 2016 online census

[@robswc]

Yea, I’ve worked with government and this sums up every project 😂

[@Beknown107]

Crazy how something like this website can be built by a 15 year old in an afternoon nowadays

[@nup5]

this video is a f'in gold mine