Anyone want to develop software for TSA?

[Angel Eyes]

You can make good money doing very little:

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/04/05/tsa-paid-47000-for-app-that-just-displayed-arrow.html?intcmp=hplnws

Today's SMH story comes courtesy of the TSA, who Mashable reports paid IBM $47,400 for "software so simple" that creating it would have been well within the reach of a novice app developer.
...
"The TSA Randomizer iPad App Cost $1.4 Million." But a TSA rep tells Mashable $336,413.59 was paid to IBM for "mobile application development," with the aforementioned $47,400 earmarked for the randomizer software; Mashable reports the $1.4 million is the total of the overall contract with IBM.

Here's a tutorial on how to develop such an app.  Takes about 10 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GEpqmPL3bg

[cordex]

Having been a part of some minor software development for government, IBM may have actually lost money on that one after they paid their lawyers, software people, security consultants, usability experts, endless meetings tying up software teams, code reviews, etc.  Sure, maybe it could have been written in ten minutes by a high school student and it probably didn't work very well at the end of the day, but I shudder to think of the man-hours they had to spend before a single line of code was even written.

Or, perhaps more likely, as this was a small portion of a larger contract it was where they made a little money to cover the overhead caused by the rest of the rest of the deal. No small company could ever afford the admin costs of taking on that kind of project even if it just took their coder an hour to actually finish the app and they got $47,000 for it.

[zahc]

97% of that cost was from doing business with the government.

[RevDisk]

Unless said high school programmer is familiar with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and 48 C.F.R. 31, they'd would be fined if they were lucky, prison time if not.

Doing business with the government isn't cheap.

[Fly320s]

Unless said high school programmer is familiar with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and 48 C.F.R. 31, they'd would be fined if they were lucky, prison time if not.

Doing business with the government isn't cheap.

Is that different than the Federal Aviation Regulations?  Just curious.

[MechAg94]

I think it is both what cordex and zahc said. 

I used to know an engineer that worked for Boeing.  He said there were armies of people whose sole purpose was to tell design engineers "no".  For every engineer actually designing new stuff there were 10 people reviewing it and telling them what to do.  Every time someone makes a mistake, the bureaucratic mentality is to create a new form or QA/QC step to prevent that from ever happening again.  Eventually, you create so many forms and steps that nothing new can be done without great effort and cost. 

[RevDisk]

Is that different than the Federal Aviation Regulations?  Just curious.

That's 14 CFR.