[logicslave]

Everyone has their tin foil hat with stuff on like this, but unless they are paying a 100 - 1000 engineers 250k-500k a year, I doubt theyve built anything useful with uptime. Maybe they could just scan a massive dataset of everyones posts, with some string searching, but still. I just dont see any entity like this being able to accomplish this task effectively.

[barbazoo]

Why do you believe that unless they're paying their developers "250k-500k a year", they wouldn't have built something useful?

[logicslave]

Because analyzing all of social media with efficiency and effectively is really hard.

[barbazoo]

It implies that only an extremely highly paid developer can write efficient code which I think just isn't true.

[logicslave]

I've been programming for 15 years and worked at firms of all sizes and payscale, I see a direct correlation between the two

[_Nat_]

What would "100 - 1000 engineers" even be doing?

The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts:

> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

, so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media.

Granted, a lot of the post-scanning would seem better done by bots, and stuff like sentiment-analysis could help classify posts for human inspection, so they'd probably want to hire a few engineers, but why hundreds? And why 250-500 kUSD/yr for such mundane work?

[logicslave]

Exactly.

"> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies."

This is useless and nobody should fear it. You should fear a set of teams of highly trained technologists. Thats not what we have here

[millzlane]

The entity's only job is to create a RFP and pick one. It's the company they hire that you have to worry about. The one thing we can count on is the government will spend the money to get what they want.