[jevinskie]

I'm curious to see what caliber/capabilities HN thinks software that costs $33 million should offer. I have experience with cycle accurate emulators that cost $100k/floating license but never anything at the $33 million level!

[GFischer]

Well, the company I work for has quotes from both CSC and Guidewire for their insurance packages (kind of an ERP for insurance companies), which would handle all of our processes, and they ran in the "tens of millions" category between licensing, implantation and other costs.

You can check http://www.guidewire.com/ or http://www.csc.com/ if you need a multimillion dollar insurance solution :)

Guidewire at least has hundreds of people working on their insurance suite, some of then I've written to sound very capable and I really like their development process. They even created their own language based on the JVM (Gosu).

http://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/

I'm sure CSC has some equally good people, but I haven't come across them :)

[JPKab]

CSC was the prime contractor for the Air Force's attempt at an ERP. 5 years and $1 billion later, there is no ERP to speak of.

[GFischer]

Good thing we didn't go with them, then :) .

Personally, I thought Guidewire fit our needs very well (but I'm at the very bottom of the totem pole).

[debacle]

300 man-years of development is crazy huge for almost any software project I can think of.

[smackfu]

You don't think Apple or Microsoft or Adobe or Facebook have 300 developers working on their projects? Just saying, 300 man years isn't that much, considering every full time employee working on a project for a year is a man year by definition.

[danso]

Yeah, but...any of those aforementioned companies produce products which each generate more usage in a day than the FactFinder likely generates in a month or even a year.

[Tangaroa]

For $33 million, I would expect not to see "American FactFinder requires an Internet Browser with Javascript enabled." I would expect them to be able afford a developer who knows how to create links with an "a" tag rather than using Javascript to duplicate a core browser feature. Given that this is a federal website, $33 million should be more than enough money to comply with disability guidelines that forbid such sloppy development practices on federal websites.

$33 million is 500 programmer man-years, minus a bit for overhead and profit. That should produce a lot of development.

I wonder if the $33 million cost includes the backend work done on the DADS II contract, or if that figure is just for the web frontend.

[_delirium]

> $33 million is 500 programmer man-years

Where do you live where $66k/yr the total cost of employing a programmer? I don't know what IBM uses for its internal accounting, but based on what several other large tech companies use, $200k/yr is a decent guess (including salary+benefits+overhead). That'd mean 165 man-years, and only a fraction of those 165 would be programmers, since the contract also needs to pay for managers, sales, billing, legal, etc.

[binarycrusader]

The midwest (Kansas, Missouri, so on...)? Seriously. $40K a year annual salary, and if you add in all the benefits, that might hit $66K.

[_delirium]

I don't know much about Kansas, but that is definitely not the going rate for enterprise programmers in St. Louis. But in any case, what proportion of software jobs are in the (non-Chicago) Midwest, anyway? The government is basically stuck with whoever submits a bid, which is most likely to be companies in the "IBM and competitors" category, and their cost structures are well into the $200k range (I wouldn't be surprised at $250k-$300k).

[binarycrusader]

Who said anything about enterprise programmers?

I have no idea why my parent comment was downvoted; I posted something based on my own (painful) experience and knowledge of what various other people I know made in programming jobs at the time.

There's actually a lot of programming jobs to be had in the midwest; courtesy of companies like Sprint, Oracle, credit card processing companies, large furniture service companies, and others.

[MBCook]

In KC, $40k might be a fresh-out-of-school salary, but even then it sounds low to me.

[keypusher]

Total employee cost is much greater than just salary.

[Steko]

I also heard programmers like to use computers. On desks. In offices. With air conditioning. Uh oh, those darn costs keep going up.