Curiously... Any take on Michael Slaby, Timshel (defunct), The Groundwork (defunct), the dozens (up to 70 at one point, many from SV/NYC) of engineers that worked on it for roughly two years in close contact with HFA 2016 (The Groundwork was right down the street from HFA 2016 HQ), and the $700,000 that HFA 2016 paid for that work? More generally, do you think there is a problem with for-profits which focus on political organizations under the guise of "focusing on non-profit"? How often do you think illegal in-kind contributions take place through these companies to political campaigns?
I worked with Michael Slaby in 2008 and 2012. He's an incredible technology manager. He's great at punching up and fighting for his engineer's perspectives and helping upper management understand limitations and then getting out of the way.
Since that time he's probably had his own epiphanies from working in industry but one of mine was that we did shockingly little QA and everything was built as fast as humanly possible. Everything was building the airplane in the air and it was largely due to constraints of the political or legal kind. Timeline management and allocating resources to testing was always an afterthought.
Testing usually comes from a feedback loop of launching broken features, incident response, manager gets in hot water, engineer gets in hot water, engineer proposes testing plan, manager uses incident as primary source reference to secure additional budget, testing implemented.
In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle.
"In politics no service, company, initiative, or team lasts long enough to complete the cycle."
This is systemic corruption. A billionaire can dump as much money into a for-profit company to build a platform for a specific campaign and then when the campaign is over then can claim that there isn't enough business to keep the platform solvent for the next 2 to 4 years and do it all again with the benefit of the previous code base. It's better than a Super PAC because the for-profit company can work directly with the campaign and no one will bat an eye. The company can even have foreign financing. All the while, their losses amount to a huge tax write-off and the public pays the bill.
In the case of The Groundwork, it likely cost upwards of $10 million for the people, building lease, AWS costs, etc. But where did all of the money come from? Certainly Hillary didn't pay for this. I'd love to see Eric Schmidt's 2016 Tax Returns.
