This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors.
When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite.
It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.
What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it?
Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.
There are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It’s hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.
And yet, the complaints about the website were not about the lack of regulatory compliance, dealing with insurers, etc., but of basic technical issues - logging in, navigating the site, "glitches".
Well, I still think 4 guys in a basement could have come up with a better framework to build off of even without the regulatory compliance part.
It's like the company Simplifile - small company in Utah. They have only a handful of developers that build actual website front/backend infrastructure, and then they have a team of specialists whose job it is to become expert in all of the county laws across the USA and create requirements out of them.
This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors.
When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite.
It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.