Which one of you ballers made this website for $18 Mill??

crackp0t said:
Wouldn't it make more sense for the to just host at SuperNAP in Las Vegas? The place already has a shit load of government contracts and has armed security patrolling it.
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Make sense? Possibly - to you and me. To everyone else - no.

Think about it this way - let's say you are some mid-to high level executive in whatever the hell branch of government owns this. You put the project out to bids with what you THINK the requirements are. Keep in mind you have probably never built one website.

You get the bids. One of them looks fantastic, and also happens to be the most expensive one. You take this bid and portray it to upper management as the "best" bid. You get this project approved. You now have an additional 18 MM in budget to throw around.

There is literally zero incentive to come in under budget or reduce costs.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen it. I saw one site built for internal use that cost $4,000,000. All this system did was allow employees to start their retirement process. It was stupid data entry forms (and not many of them) and it was "highly secured" which was one of the project requirements. How was it secured? HTTPS + nothing else. No data encryption in the database, very wide access to the system, etc. You could have built the thing in PHP or any other standard language for pennies on the dollar.

I could go on but I will stop.
 


lukep said:
So you'd think by now that the common German citizen would appreciate more capitalism and less socialism in their government, right? :action-smiley-027:
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You are such an idiot, it is unbelievable.

::emp::
 
lukep said:
Touchy, touchy... Just saying there was a lesson to be learned in your example...
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I will take you up on this.

Even though the examples quoted are government examples, the same applies to any large organization.

I worked in one of the biggest international banks. IT project lead.

Most projects go over budget because of one simple reason:
Politics

Deparments compete for attention and money, managers of all colors want to build their carreer, everyone wants something different.

Scope creep lurks on every corner and if not kept in check will kill any project or leave it 100-300% over budget.

Of course these problems are compounded in gubmint projects, but mostly this is not a political as in left/right wing capitalist/communist issue.

For your interest, the projects I mentioned above were not run into the ground by some mysterious "socialist" government, but by the German conservative parties (CDU/CSU for the most part).

TL;DR
The only real lesson to be learned is that you need very, very solid project management and change management in big projects.

::emp::

PS: Please, do learn what socialism and communism mean and how that does not apply to the German SPD (the party in power right now).
 
The Federal government paid a firm $9.5 million to redesign the site. It will pay $8.4 million more through 2014.

Why is this so expensive? Because, we are assured, there will be so much traffic.

So, I went to Alexa the Web Information Company. It ranks sites in terms of traffic. I typed in Recovery.gov - Tracking the Money. I learned that the site is ranked in the top 151,400 worldwide. It is ranked 65,500 in the USA. For comparison, Google is ranked #1.

This site, The Tea Party Economist: Helping you to get through the economic mine field in one piece., is ranked 83,200 worldwide and 15,500 in the USA. It has been online for about five months. It uses WordPress.org’s software, which is free. It uses a few plug-ins, which are free. This site and a dozen more like it are managed by one employee. He was an unpaid intern two months ago.

Spending by the federal government is out of control. You know it. I know it. But it will not stop. There is nothing that voters can do, or want to do, about it. They think this will go on forever. They think the bills will not come true. They are wrong.
 
Taken from the article... Damn 18 fucking million dollars for a website design + Hosting ?

The Bulgarian Government paid 5 000 000$ for a shitty tourist website, last year which looks just horrible and loads slow as fuck, so that shows that not only the USA Government spends the tax dollars on complete shit!
 
emp said:
PS: Please, do learn what socialism and communism mean and how that does not apply to the German SPD (the party in power right now).
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Please, do learn that I'm not some ignorant american shouting "Muricka fuck yeah!"

I'm an anarchist who sees America as more socialist than Germany... So when I made fun of your country for defending its' bureaucracy, I wasn't really singling out Germany; I loathe all governments pretty much equally. They'd all buy $18 Million websites, like others here have said.
 
And as I just pointed out, this is not capitalism / free market versus socialism / Gubmint.

This shit happens everywhere. Read my last example: One of the Top5 international banks.

They sink so much money into failed IT projects every fucking year, it makes you puke.
And my guess would be that nothing is more capitalist than a bank.

::emp::
 
emp said:
And my guess would be that nothing is more capitalist than a bank.

::emp::
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You would be wrong in that case, banks are so heavily regulated and receive so much funding from central banks it isn't funny.
 
but the money is to cover all of the traffic! facepalm.tiff

fuck

i feel like i need to change my avatar to a facepalmer being that i am an american on this international forum. it is fucking embarrassing to see articles like this of clear negligence and fucking stupidity.
 
Why it costs $18 Million to build a website.

Congressman 1 thinks he needs more monies to get elected next election season but he's also trying to present himself as a fiscal conservative who will fix the governments budget problems. So he takes a little trip to a nice government funded dinner that cost $2 Million to throw to feed about 20 people or so. At this dinner there's a couple of hotshot government contractors who just scored several million from the government and are looking for more cause, well you know why not.

So they chat it up and turns out they have a guy who can make a website. Weird kid they pay $300 to but who cares about that. Anyway they chat a while and the Congressman says he'll need about $15 Million for him and his buddies campaigns coming up and he really wonders where he could get it. Contractor A being smart starts talking about how he loves to donate to Congressman 1's party and wants to support them in the coming election season. Congressman 1 and Contractor A come to an "agreement" that if he were to get a fat contract to make a website he would donate a lot to the Congressmans campaign.

After buttering up the Congressman a while he jots down a nice little line item of $18 Million right under a line item for $235 Million for plungers and $632 Million for tie clips for the Secret Service. That $18 Million website looks like nothing and is dirt cheap I mean why didn't we have to pay more it's not like it's real money right?

So they attach this nice little rider onto some bill about stopping people from raping dolphins or something that no sensible politician could ever vote against and voila contract done. There's a little faux bidding period for the contract that everyone knows Contractor A will get and it ends he get's his money and donations flow. He still ends up making millions to crank out a few thousand dollar website and no one cares cause it's not like it was money stolen from the American people was it? Oh it was.

Anyway it probably went something like that, and the names have been changed cause this is obviously fiction and shit but an example of how this gets done.
 
$500 for a pencil, $3k for a stapler, $18 million for a website.

Nobody is paying attention anyway.

And yes, doing sites for local government agencies is a gold mine. You can charge them whatever you want and they'll pay it. Because it's uncle sam's money, not theirs. They don't give a fuck.

You think I making a living on WF with you broke bitches? LMAO!
 
Yes, we laughed and I know for a fact if one of us had the chance to build this site at 17.9 mil would've declined. right?

Why we always talk about waste and at the same time we 'manipulate' people to buy shit they don't need.

Oh wait. Not all of us market worthless shit, some of the big dogs represent big brands.
 
SEO Monkey said:
That would indeed amount to a horrible use of tax money. But that assumes your unsupported premise. Seen another way, this website aims to:

"Create transparency so that citizens understand where their tax money is going and how it's helping the economy."

Then one can say this is great for democracy as it encourages citizenship and participation. An informed population makes for a better country.

In this light, $18 million is an efficient use of tax payer money.
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How is that an efficient use of tax payer money when the same result could've been achieved easily with 1% of that budget?
 
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