Submitted by PublicCommenter t3_11x56x9 in pittsburgh
ktxhopem3276 t1_jd9hhwc wrote
Reply to comment by dlppgh in Let's pour one out for the developers of Pittsburgh by PublicCommenter
dlppgh t1_jdcw86k wrote
LOL! This discussion isn't a personal attack. Just trying to help you understand a bit more.
I worked on both iBurgh and Snow Tracker implementation while in city employ.
iBurgh was a mess - a disaster that Peduto brought to us and demanded we implement. The developers of the app were friends of his. The app wasn't anywhere close to being production ready...and it ultimately was abandoned because the developer just couldn't or wouldn't fix the many issues. Afterwards Peduto blamed the failure on Luke Ravenstahl - which was comical and entirely false.
The Snow Tracker was/is a disaster also. Really, a book should be written to describe that whole fiasco. Among the highlights - corrupt procurement, opacity of DPW, failure of leadership to understand or provide requirements, CYA nonsense, and on and on.
iBurgh happened while he was a councilman. He had no tech role. He did throw a bunch of fits as the project kinda bombed. His main interest was that we beat Boston to the punch in announcing it, he didn't give a rip about whether it worked or what he was demanding in terms of department time/resources to deal with it.
Snow Tracker started the minute he became mayor - fueled by his fear that a snow storm would generate criticism of him, and he should know about that - he usually led the charge against the prior admin when snowflakes fell. He knew exactly how unfair or how difficult that would be to deal with, because he himself had lobbed unfair/difficult criticism over the years. The Snow Tracker was literally all he wanted to talk about in the first few weeks of his administration, and that took a toll on getting a good start with so many other things. He was petulant, childish, difficult. And...the thing still is a mess.
dlppgh t1_jdcylmz wrote
A little more about iBurgh - in this city, to get some tech idea off the ground, all you have to do is find some way to get the letters CMU into the mix, and people are ready to get out of your way reverently. That's a big problem...and no one was a bigger purveyor of this approach than Bill Peduto. In that case, the company "developing" it was a person who had some non-tech affiliation with CMU (a friend/acquaintance of Bill's) and a student who was trying to run an access database on a PC he had literally in his dorm room.
That's not how you build good software, even in the context of how city people want to "pull levers" to do it. Silly...and it's a shame these things are remembered (or Google search-curated) somehow by you and others as successes.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdd3sk6 wrote
> In that case, the company "developing" it was a person who had some non-tech affiliation with CMU (a friend/acquaintance of Bill's)
No. Priya Narasimhan is a professor with a PhD in computer science
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/directory/bios/narasimhan-priya.html
> and a student who was trying to run an access database on a PC he had literally in his dorm room.
No. We had an office with a rack full of Dell servers and we used Microsoft sql server MySQL. I can’t remember which we used on iBurgh. The memory that sticks in my mind vividly is the city used an old version of the database software and wouldn’t let us use a newer version.
You have some misunderstandings about the that project and exhibit the same condescending attitude I remember the city employees had at the time.
I don’t think CMU deserves the bad reputation some people have about them. I think politicians use the school to get publicity. The panther hollow project was goofy and I don’t think the school even wanted it as much as Bill did. But I also think the outrage against that project was simple NIMBYs and opportunistic activists riding on the hate toward Upmc which is a much bigger problem with abusing their nonprofit status, low pay and poor working conditions
dlppgh t1_jdd7tk0 wrote
OK, thanks for correcting on Priya. However, I don't say that a prof in CS necessarily knows a thing about application development just because they hold a CS credential, and in this case, that really proved out. You're saying that she didn't do well managing the project because it was difficult and "not worth the trouble"...boy, I don't think that's a shining endorsement, and I think it's an admission of why the thing failed, really.
My characterization of a student with an access DB in his dorm room - truthfully, literally - was how Priya described your side of things when things didn't move along as they should have. So, thanks for correcting, but...
I think you probably had some difficulty working through networking and firewall stuff. I can back you up there - the city at the time was embarrassingly deficient in Network Admins, but...I'm not even sure why they had the role they did in the plan. There was no reason for user-submitted data to even enter the city firewall, I remember making that point. At very least, on your side you could have stood up a prototype that proved out your concept and feature development. Getting hung up on networking...not something that should have happened.
Maybe you know better now - building software can be difficult, and when you face issues, you have to take ownership, stay focused, keep pressing and finding creative solutions. What you can't do is just recede, talk crap about your own team behind their backs, shift blame to others. But, maybe not...
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdd8koj wrote
You are arrogant and have no self awareness of how condescending you come across
dlppgh t1_jddaj5s wrote
Thanks for the evaluation, I'll file it away...and I'll keep my evaluation of you to myself. But I'm not seeing any substantive responses to the points I've made...telling...
dlppgh t1_jdd99l5 wrote
>I don’t think CMU deserves the bad reputation some people have about them.
My point is that this "reputation" gets thrown around when someone wants to lend power to their amateurish software projects, and in many cases, that works for them. Without question, CMU has some of the best people in the world doing things...and they have others. Nothing monolithic - either good or bad - should be assumed when the CMU letters get tossed in, but that mistake is often made. I hope you understand that point better.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdd9jcx wrote
> Nothing monolithic - either good or bad
That’s just a basic fact about any org
>I hope you understand that point better.
condescending
dlppgh t1_jddcr6e wrote
...you're kinda thin-skinned, aren't you? Not difficult to see why you'd have some trouble guiding a software project to completion.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jddhktf wrote
Bill asked us to do a favor to give back to the city while we had plenty of paying customers we could have been working on instead. Priya runs software for many major league sports teams and does well at it.
>Just trying to help you understand it
> i hope you understand that point better
Your just assuming you know best and have to explain it to me like I’m a child … buzz off
dlppgh t1_jddr91u wrote
Here's the problem. At that point, Bill Peduto was a City Councilman. He came at the CIS department not from a position of authority - in fact he did his best NOT to work with the administration chain of command. A "favor" to Bill - and him berating our Director - was outside of our workflow.
To emphasize - a "favor" to Bill Peduto involving a department and a team of employees that don't report to him isn't a valid workflow. We ALSO had important projects that our actual bosses tasked us with.
A software project done as a "favor" - that's typical of Peduto's leadership shortcomings. He was lucky that our Director even gave him the time of day, but he did...and that sort of thing didn't go over well in his chain of command.
I wonder how far "favor" software projects flung over by councilpeople got when Bill became mayor. Probably not far. Sadly, his leadership shortcomings only became more pronounced.
If Priya had paying customers that got back-burnered for this "favor"...yeesh, what a debacle. What an operational miasma. Those customers must have wondered what they were paying for. Maybe after paying the company, they also needed to ask Peduto for a favor, eh?
Silly nonsense.
dlppgh t1_jddc9u9 wrote
>I also think the outrage against that project was simple NIMBYs and opportunistic activists riding on the hate toward Upmc
Dude, they were residents of the Run...people who lived there. You're eager to call other people "condescending", but wow, dismissing their concerns in this way is just insulting and thick-headed.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jddg5nl wrote
> Dude, they were residents of the Run...people who lived there.
The people living there wanted the money to go to their problems instead. Their houses are built on a drainage channel and will never stop flooding. It didn’t seem to me like they made any compelling arguments about how the MOC would negatively affect them besides spend the money on bailing out their basements instead. There are two sides to every project and also a lot of shill involved so everyone has to think for themselves about who is telling the truth and who isn’t. There was a pile on affect of every activist in the city jumping in to hate on upmc and cmu and they took advantage of the local residents to get their chance in the limelight. The project was probably a waste of money and I don’t think cmu or anyone with influence really cared about it anyway. But I think it was more about using the schools as a punching bag than it was about actually helping the run. Now that the project is canceled, the activists have moved on to other nonprofit bashing efforts while the run is still in the same shit condition and always will be because saline street should be a stream instead of a street
dlppgh t1_jddrsmc wrote
>It didn’t seem to me like they made any compelling arguments about how the MOC would negatively affect them besides spend the money on bailing out their basements instead.
I'm not touching this mess, other than to say that you've done an awful job understanding their concerns. I'm certainly happy to note that your conception of the concerns wasn't relevant in how that whole thing went down.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jddux2a wrote
The residents of the run have been insufferable and have shit on anything and everything as PWSA attempts to improve drainage in their neighborhood. It’s been clear for a while now that they expect special treatment and a bailout because they chose to live in a drainage ditch
> “It doesn’t do enough given the severity and the frequency of flooding,” he said, referencing PWSA’s presentation that showed projected reductions in 10-year floods. “[Flooding is] going to increase with climate change and out of control development.”
> The project’s manager Tony Igwe said there will be reductions at other levels, too, but that no city in the country has built infrastructure to withstand 75-year flood levels. He added that PWSA is constrained by what the agency’s ratepayers can afford.
> “Whatever we provide for Four Mile Run we have to provide for the rest of the system,” he said, adding that part of their approach in planning is to create infrastructure that can adjust to future realities. “But we have to pick something that people can actually afford.”
dlppgh t1_jde7ydt wrote
You've got it backwards. No one in The Run objects to necessary storm infrastructure improvements. They object to them being paired with a silly, inadequate, poorly planned and extremely unpopular autonomous project.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdelufu wrote
They only care about themselves. They are mad that PWSA won’t spend more money on them. $36 million is $500,000 per house in the run. They think PWSA has some sort of obligation to make up for the fact that their houses are in the worst possible location for flooding. Blocking the MOC was simply because they wanted every last cent to go toward them.
As I said before, the MOC project was mediocre. My point is the conspiracy around cmu being a power broker trying to screw over people is exaggerated. Cmu has put a lot of effort into storm water management on campus with green roofs rain gardens and underground cisterns. If you are looking for an evil non profit go look at upmc.
Peduto was never shy about proposing audacious projects and some were good and some were bad but at least he had is heart in it and I got no impression he was just doing it for special interest groups. But activists couldn’t stand that he wasn’t a flame thrower directed at every for profit and non profit business in the city.
Meanwhile, during snowmageddon, ravenstahl was hiding out in seven springs and spent days refusing to tell the public where he was bc he was staying in the condo of one of the largest real estate developers in the county. somebody in hazlewood died because an ambulance couldn’t get through the unplowed streets. I met ravenstahl once while he was at a penguins game in the box suite of the law firm representing burns and scalo. Ravenstahl never saw a corporate handout he couldn’t refuse like the $9000 sponsorship from upmc for a golf tournament.
I don’t know if gainey will be a better mayor but it’s not like peduto was unpopular. He lost to gainey 26,000 to 22,000 in a city of 300,000 people. Which is impressive that peduto managed to last as long as he did. He wasn’t afraid to take risks like when he pushed for removing parking from schenly plaza and added bike lanes and round abouts. These sort of changes drive reactionary people crazy even though they were the right way to go. He lasted 20 years in city politics so in my mind he deserves a pat on the back. Gainey is quickly finding out how hard and intense the criticism is when you are mayor versus just a state legislator.
dlppgh t1_jdepghy wrote
>somebody in hazlewood died because an ambulance couldn’t get through the unplowed streets.
I was in the City County Building that day. Ravenstahl was heavily affected by that and he had a meeting with Public Safety officials in which he was losing it - loudly screaming. It's not fair or accurate to say that this wasn't on Luke's radar. You don't have to tell me or anyone else who worked for the city at that time about it.
I spent about a month's work of work focused specifically on Snowmageddon. I can tell you more about how it affected the city organization than you probably want to hear.
That much snow would have paralyzed the city no matter who the mayor was. Yes, Luke was in Seven Springs, but that's irrelevant. Snow removal operations are/were the specific task of a specific manager in DPW. And guess what - that manager during snowmageddon was the same manager tasked with the same responsibility until he retired during the Peduto admin.
Any changes that took place after snowmageddon started taking place immediately in 2010. They weren't appreciably improved under Peduto. The snow tracker was NOTHING except a costly CYA move that did absolutely nothing to improve snow response times or efficiency.
I have a few things I credit Peduto for...but he also earned my disrespect. He worked hard at it and he finally broke me.
I am going to politely tell you that Googling up a few stories in 2023 isn't an adequate replacement for knowing what you're talking about.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdeqjjb wrote
> Yes, Luke was in Seven Springs, but that's irrelevant.
You don’t leave town to have a birthday party with a wealthy developer at his ski condo while the city is facing the worst snow storm in decades.
> I have a few things I credit Peduto for...but he also earned my disrespect. He worked hard at it and he finally broke me. I am going to politely tell you that Googling up a few stories in 2023 isn't an adequate replacement for knowing what you're talking about.
You are so special and have earned the privilege to talk down to everyone that isn’t a government employee.
dlppgh t1_jdje390 wrote
You can weep about my tone all you want, but I don't see you addressing substance even for a moment.
For the record - seeing you lambaste residents of The Run for daring to care about their community, and then trading in silly childish whining about my condescension...is uniquely goofy.
If someone actually condescends in their tone to you, you'll have earned it many times over.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdjip4q wrote
You’ve been attacking me for days because I said something positive about peduto. Most people have some pent up emotions about their boss. You might need therapy if hearing something positive about your former boss is so upsetting.
They are entitled to care about their community and voice their concerns. But it’s fair to be on the lookout for selfish nimby opposition to a project. The neighborhood people were being ignored and only got attention when people saw the opportunity to dunk on a large nonprofit and the mayor.
dlppgh t1_jdds0oy wrote
>Now that the project is canceled, the activists have moved on to other nonprofit bashing efforts while the run is still in the same shit condition and always will be because saline street should be a stream instead of a street
just...wow...
I wish you a good day, and lotsa luck.
ktxhopem3276 t1_jdcysc5 wrote
Could have fooled me with your condescending attitude. I wrote the iburgh software while a student at cmu. The city tech department obviously had no interest in the project being a success. The outdated software stack they insisted on us interfacing with was a major issue. The professor at cmu in charge of the project had no experience working with government contracting and was in over her head but what she learned was government contracting is just not worth the trouble in most cases. She focused more on the sports apps for the penguins at the time bc the team was just more interested in trying new things. Clearly you just don’t like Peduto bc he dared to try to push the city to change its outdated ways. This is the problem every mayor faces when they get into office. Every department is a fiefdom and resist any change.
dlppgh t1_jdd16bk wrote
Wow, ok. I have to say, the software stack you introduced left a lot to be desired. The team you briefly interacted with at the city definitely wanted to work with you and did so when given that opportunity. But the person on your side who need to manage the project just didn't do anything except shift blame around - blaming you a good portion of the time, you should know.
Yes, there are a fair amount of obstacles for things like networking and firewalls when it comes to working with the city, but even setting those things aside, you guys had considerable difficulty fixing your bugs or collecting feature requests or just with implementation in general. Blaming that on the city is goofy. You guys weren't the right team to be doing that project, which is why it sunk.
As for me "not liking" Peduto because he was progressive and spoke about fixing problems and reform...also silly. I liked him for exactly those reasons, and I supported these ideas until it was clear that he really had no ability to take any of it past talk. I only "disliked" him when he started handing out blame and making excuses and retreating from the stuff he said he'd work on. I worked for 7 years trying to "push the city to change its outdated ways", I didn't just yap about it.
Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments