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THE VIDEO SHELF · healthcare.gov failure

dotScale 2014 - Robert Kennedy - Life in the Trenches of healthcare.gov

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN recommends it as an entertaining first-hand engineer account of what went wrong with healthcare.gov and how it was fixed, including that no one owned the whole site.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
dotconferences
Topic
healthcare.gov failure
Format
talk
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
5
Recommendation years in dataset
2014–2015

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • I was part of the "tech surge" brought in to help patch up healthcare.gov in December. The GAO report gives a decent idea of what went wrong in 2010-2013 from a high-level contracting and policy perspective, but it doesn't really give much technical detail or …

    brandonb on Hacker News · 2014-07
    In Poorly Managed HealthCare.gov Construction Cost $840M, Watchdog Finds

  • Worth watching: [VIDEO] I like the way the presenter sums it up...it seems like each contractor was responsible for their own little piece of the stack, and nobody was actually responsible for delivering a website . That should've been the gating criteria.

    angersock on Hacker News · 2014-07
    In “Agile” methodologies blamed for healthcare.gov failure

  • You can watch a very entertaining talk from one of the Google engineers who went to fix the website at the time: [VIDEO]

    sylvinus on Hacker News · 2015-09
    In How Healthcare.gov Botched $600M Worth of Contracts

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.