“I found that OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor) have an Android application,” Rich Jones reports for Gun.io. “The purpose of the application is to provide information about the heat index and the corresponding safety warnings. Essentially, it is a temperature converter, it converts a temperature into a safety level. Being an Android developer myself, I wanted to give it a try to see how it handled.”
Jones reports, “It’s a steamy pile of shit.”
“Pardon my French, but I really cannot stress how bad this application is. Firstly, it isn’t actually capable of the function it is supposed to do. When I first tried the application, it told me that it was currently 140F in Boston. It is also extremely slow, it looks like butt, and it crashes all the time. It is completely horrible in every way,” Jones reports. “If I had to reproduce it, I’d say that it would take be about 6 hours at the maximum. At my hourly rate of $100, that’s $600. Now, the quality of the product didn’t surprise me a huge amount – I don’t ever expect very much from the federal government. Still, I was curious about how much we taxpayers payed for the program – and it knocked me off my feet.”
“To find out, I filed a Freedom of Information Act Request for the cost of the application, the names of the developers and the source code,” Jones reports. “The application cost $106,467 for the Android version, and an additional $96,000 for the iPhone and (non-existent) BlackBerry version. That’s more than $200,000 for less than $2,000 worth of non-functional temperature converters.”
Jones reports, “The shocking part about this isn’t even that it happened, but rather that it is incredibly routine. This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department for one tiny, single use application that will perhaps be used by, at most, five hundred people – and it cost as much as a house. You can imagine what the waste must be like in other government run sectors, like defense, aerospace, infrastructure and energy.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. – Ronald Reagan
When George Washington threw the dollar across the Rappahannock River, he didn’t realize he was establishing a precedent for government spending. – Harold Coffin
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]