Amazing how this month we’ve gone from repeal ACA to defund ACA to delay ACA to delay small parts of ACA to fix that website, pronto!
— Matt Lee (@URFloorMatt) October 23, 2013
Over the weekend, the Obama administration announced a “tech surge” in order to fix Healthcare.gov. Timothy B. Lee doubts this will work:
Not only will more programmers not necessarily speed up the development process very much, it could actually make things worse. That’s because existing programmers will need to spend time training the new programmers, assigning them tasks, and coordinating their efforts with the new, larger development team. … [A]dding more people to the HealthCare.gov team may actually lengthen the time it takes to build the HealthCare.gov Web site.
This phenomenon, in which adding people to a late software project makes it later, is known as Brooks’s Law. In the mid-1960s, Fred Brooks managed the project to build OS/360, a complex IBM operating system for mainframes. In 1975, he wrote a famous book called “The Mythical Man Month” about the experience.
“When schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower.” Brooks wrote. “Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse.”
McArdle makes similar points:
While outsiders may be valuable for small, concrete tasks and a fresh take on particularly tough problems, they can’t just come in and fix everything. If the contractors and HHS managers who built the federal exchange can’t fix it in the next month, then it’s just not going to get fixed in the next month.
Yuval Levin identifies another reason why Silicon Valley’s tech mavens can’t save the site:
I think the idea that Silicon Valley types are going to rescue the bureaucracy confuses two kinds of technical mastery: experimental innovation and consolidated management. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses, but these two visions generally do not play well together. Successful technology firms do a huge amount of trial and error, avoid over-management, and create adaptive knowledge systems that work by learning and are constantly tested against competitors. The federal bureaucracy develops and enforces uniform rules meant to apply technical knowledge it (thinks it) already possesses to a complex and chaotic world to make it simpler and more orderly — to make it do the bidding of policymakers. As Max Weber put it, “bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge.” The maxim of the Internet age is closer to “liberation through knowledge.”
The Dish 