Robert Reich has the Facebook post When the rollout of Obamacare was screwed up, conservatives blamed the government.

When the rollout of Obamacare was screwed up, conservatives blamed the government; when the NSA’s software didn’t work, it was supposedly government’s fault. Now, it seems, there’s a major problem with air-traffic control — and you can bet the right will blame the government.

The reality is that these glitches were the work of for-profit contractors and sub-contractors. A large and growing portion of government is contracted out to the private sector, which doesn’t always do the job as promised. The real questions are: Should the government do as much contracting out as it’s doing? And how can government do a better job monitoring what those contractors are up to?

What’s your view?

With 40 years of computer software engineering experience in the private sector, it just so happens that I do have an opinion.

With all the contracting out, there apparently are not enough people in the government who know how a software project should be managed. Therefore, they do not know when a private sector company is mismanaging a software contract.

As for the screw up in the ACA rollout, you cannot develop a software system that has lots of pieces that depend on each other and not test the system with all the pieces together until the last moments before going public.

In what is called a “top down design and implementation”, you design and implement each part starting at the top, the interface between that part and the rest of the world. With that kind of implementation strategy, you are able to do system tests with all parts working together almost from the very beginning of the project. The most tested part of the project is then the interfaces between the parts of the system.

If you wait until the end to put all the parts together and see how they work, you are going to wind up with massive surprises that are very difficult to fix. Do it the other way around, and the problems in the interfaces are found early when they are easy to fix.

If you don’t understand this as a manager or a contract overseer, you cannot detect a massive screw-up at the very beginning of a project when you can fire the contractors if you need to.

When I retired in 2006, there were still an awful lot of people in the software industry that hadn’t gotten the message about top down implementation. Our government seems to hire them all. Low-ball estimates are de riguer in private industry, just like they are in government contracting.

Many times when presenting a proposed project to managament, I wanted to start by asking, “Do you want to hear the estimates that will sell you on the project, or do you want to hear the truth?” After all, I had to compete with other presenters who wanted the corporate funding for their proposals. Sometimes the other person would win, and eventually I would be called in to rescue the other person’s project.

Almost everyone in the business has seen software projects that take on too much risk, go horribly wrong, but are rescued by herculean efforts of the project team. We used to call this “A diving catch”. The people who managed to rescue their own failing projects were richly rewarded for those diving catches. The people who ran projects smoothly from beginning to end were not so appreciated. If their project was so smooth, it must have been an easy one.

We project leaders who liked to manage risk to minimize it, often thought of putting in a few bugs so we could make what looked like a diving catch. Our sense of self-actualization never let us actually do it. We took our satisfaction from accomplishing one more project well done.

Sometimes I even worked for a manager who appreciated what my team and I had achieved. I seldom had problems of appreciation among the users of our products. That is in large part what made it all worth it.

YouTube has a video The Economy: Does More Government Help or Hurt – Stephanie Kelton only.

I am so glad that Bernie Sanders has seen fit to appoint Stephanie Kelton as Chief Democratic Economist on the Senate Budget Committee. I am just waiting for more of her ideas to come out in the national conversation, and even in the Presidential campaign.

Here is a video where she presents some of her ideas. It starts with a whole bunch of ideas that she is going to knock down in the second half of the presentation. Don’t look at just the first part and think you know what she advocates.

Be sure to look for the mention of $29 Trillion.

Has anyone asked about the government paying back the $29 Trillion the government created to buy the “troubled” assets from the banks? To whom would they pay it back? The banks don’t owe it because they sold “assets” to the government to get the money. The government doesn’t owe it, because they didn’t borrow it from anyone.

The government isn’t going to get all the money back, because most of the “troubled” “assets” aren’t worth the paper they were printed on. That’s why the banks needed to be rescued.

Imagine applying this sort of logic of creating money to buy things such as rebuilding our infrastructure or paying the tuition for higher education. In this case the government would “get it’s money back” because what they were paying for is actually worth what they are paying for it, and then some. It’s called return on investment which you would think capitalists would understand. So why do we need Socialists to explain this to the Capitalists?

Here is the announcement UMKC’s Stephanie Kelton is named chief Democratic economist on the Senate Budget Committee.