Mikey Dickerson Velocity NY 2014 Keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov..."
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as a firsthand account of how dysfunctional large IT projects can be, with about 50 contractors and no one in charge.
What it is
Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2015 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec beckler · 2020-07 · on “Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work”
I saw Mikey Dickerson give a great talk about his experience leading the completion of healthcare.gov, and it sounds like you only saw a slice of it. This is the talk I attended: [this video]
Recommends beckler · 2016-07 · on “How a team of young people helped rebuild healthcare.gov (2015)”
I saw Mikey Dickerson talk about his experience in the initial recovery phase of healthcare.gov at Velocity in 2014. I think it shows just how insane the situation was. [this video]
Cites finkin1 · 2015-08 · on “The US digital service”
According to this talk, the work hours were pretty insane to fix healthcare.gov. From the 2014 Velocity Conference in New York City, Mikey Dickerson's keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov: Where Are We Now? [this video]
Cites newjersey · 2015-09 · on “How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts”
Part of the issue is everyone who is present at every meeting gets billed for the time at the meeting for the project. Mikey Dickerson talked about how there were ~50 contractor firms and nobody seemed to be in charge. This is good for all contractors because if nobody's in charge then nobody gets in trouble. [this video]
Cites FLUX-YOU · 2016-02 · on “Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley”
>How do you switch from one strain to another? End up around people that already have that strain, get their attention, and become friends so you can learn and they can teach. You unfortunately just can't teach yourself everything. It sounds like another form of pedigree selection. Or maybe dividing the field up into "us vs. them". Pretty understandable sentiment if you get pushed into fixing Healthcare.gov like he describes in one of his talks and working with guys arguing about tickets not existing because they're on different ticket systems and people with zero motivation to build a decent product. Wastage is immense in IT from the sounds of it in this talk: [this video]