Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it? You're paying a contract developer to develop an app that tallys numbers together...I would pick a shop that has experience with security over any political tilt.
> Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?
Because they tend to be motivated, they (are assumed to) have congruent motives, and they tend to understand the landscape. They also tend to be cheaper, relatively speaking.
(These developers also tend to mostly work on campaign, rather than electoral, infrastructure, which makes them a poor fit here. I don't consider it a defensible decision by the DNC, but it's very defensible for most candidates to want to hire people who want to see them elected.)
It's an app that adds numbers together for a few thousand users.
Maybe for more complex projects this might be true, but any moderately competent developer could have built this.
I believe the Iowa DNC paid around ~$50K for this app. I have a hard time believing that isn't something any good dev shop would bid for given how simple the app is.
I agree! I was trying to explain why these shops exist and are used in the general case, while also noting that this was a bad call here.
They were probably picked, to be frank, because they're the people that the folks in charge of picking a developer already had in their rolodex. Private organizations can do RFPs, but don't have to, and if you don't fully understand how bad a software project can go sideways, it's not going to be something you care too much about.
There are roughly 1,700 precincts in Iowa give or take with one ballot each...any decent 10-key operator could have transcribed the entire caucus result by midnight last night...and they needed an app? I don't care how much they spent on it, $1 was too much.
I would tend to agree. Maybe I'm ignorant of the inner machinations of political campaigns, but it seems like it's not the type of work that requires domain experience to be effective in. But that's what we would think as IT professionals, people in political campaigns may not think that way.
And really, you see this in lots of sectors where they want developers with experience in that domain even if it's not really necessary. Or at least, nowhere near as important as being a good developer is.
>Why does the developer have to have any political tilt to it?
Everybody has a political tilt. Even somebody who doesn't vote, read the news, etc will still have opinions that are the political spectrum. Have you ever met a person (not just a developer) that doesn't have a political tilt?
Individuals make up companies/organizations so no matter what you will have a company that has somebody working on it who is not completely impartial.
