This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
Maybe vote the corrupt leeches out?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannesmann-Prozess
with the golden handshake/parachute, however you may call it.
Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point?
My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries...
[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-...
Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
* https://github.com/CovidShield
No money exchanged hands AFAICT.
So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector.
Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
Sure. But it's probably nowhere close to your salary + benefits + overhead cost to your employer.
On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)
1) 30 top notch engineers to build the MVP and then iterate.
2) 300 engineers - the first 100 to step all over each other trying to build an app and the remaining 200 engineers fixing the bugs from the first 100.
Can you share your source?
UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it.
https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...
It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree.
Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data.
we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
The when and where of individual encounters, especially at low levels of infected population, are pretty irrelevant. At this point you should really be aware of how you can change your behaviour to minimise risk, that really hasn't changed in the past few months.
Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.
But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket?
Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID?
It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.
So when the app tells you to quarantine, you quarantine? Or it is important enough to share everyone's location data, but not for people to more radically adjust their behaviour rather than just avoid a particular location?
Show the evidence. Wanting data privacy is far from the fringe minority sentiment you imply it to be, otherwise GDPR wouldn't be so popular.
Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
In Canada, Shopify and Blackberry donated some engineering time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
Can't find anything on the back-end costs.
That's irrelevant when it comes to spending. The cost of something is always proportional to how much the customer(here the German government, read the taxpayer) is willing to spend not how complex the project is. While it might not be more complicated to implement than in Finland, the German government has more money than the Finish government so it was billed(read fleeced) accordingly.
It's like asking "Are SV engineer really 400x times better coders than Europeans?". Maybe not, but they can charge 400x more because their market conditions allow them to. Simple.
Do you have any source for that?
If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...)
One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.
Share of population that downloaded it - Your article only talk about the first 24 hours. See for instance this article that says 1.8 milloin a month and a half ago: https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-...
That's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Which tells me that the claim "They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year." is complete bullshit as a comparison for the German numbers, because it is only for the app itself without any backend or supporting infrastructure. Especially because you made it sound as if the rest of the 6 Million budget was not even used.
In reality, on top of the app development they spend 400k on planning, specification and coordination, 3.2 Million on other software (backend and admin, I suppose), 1.4 Million for deployment(?) and communications, and further maintenance and operations is not in fact accounted for yet.
> hat's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Ah, nice moving goalposts there.
Yes, it's a very successful project and everyone involved deserves praise. Yes, Finland spent less than Germany for very similar results.
But they didn't spend 400k (let alone 150k) compared to 60 Million. They spent 4 Million compared to 20 Million, which is the overall development costs in Germany, with most of the rest going to the operation of a support call center (and that scales with population size, so legitimately more than 10 times higher in Germany than in Finland).
So why the 5 times higher development costs in Germany? Because they didn't do a public bid like Finland did. They threw money at some big companies they assumed could do it. And for that they got an app 6 weeks earlier than Finland. It turns out that those 6 weeks happened to be a time of low case numbers so that they didn't really matter. But that couldn't be known at the time the whole thing was planned, and if the pandemic had developed differently, those 16 million could have saved thousands of lives.
In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job.
Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.