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Mikey Dickerson Velocity NY 2014 Keynote: "One Year After healthcare.gov..."

O'Reilly · 19.1K views · 2014-09-16 · 28:14

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Overview

Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as a firsthand account of how dysfunctional large IT projects can be, with about 50 contractors and no one in charge.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2015–2020

Topics

Software practice, open source & careersCloud, DevOps & reliabilityManagement, leadership & organizations
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healthcare.govus digital serviceproject failurecontractorsoperations

What people said

beckler · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation

I saw Mikey Dickerson give a great talk about his experience leading the completion of healthcare.gov, and it sounds like you only saw a slice of it. This is the talk I attended: [VIDEO]

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beckler · 2016-07 · Recommendation

I saw Mikey Dickerson talk about his experience in the initial recovery phase of healthcare.gov at Velocity in 2014. I think it shows just how insane the situation was. [VIDEO]

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FLUX-YOU · 2016-02 · Reference

>How do you switch from one strain to another? End up around people that already have that strain, get their attention, and become friends so you can learn and they can teach. You unfortunately just can't teach yourself everything. It sounds like another form of pedigree selection. Or maybe dividing the field up into "us vs. them". Pretty understandable sentiment if you get pushed into fixing Healthcare.gov like he describes in one of his talks and working with guys arguing about tickets not existing because they're on different ticket systems and people with zero motivation to build a decent product. Wastage is immense in IT from the sounds of it in this talk: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by O'Reilly, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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