What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.
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I was part of a COBOL mainframe conversion project similar to this in many ways, but smaller in scope. After 10 years with a team of hundreds, the new capability is only partially fielded. One challenge was undocumented “spaghetti code.” Another was a lack of experts in both COBOL and (for instance) AWS.
Best of luck to the team tasked with doing this.
Best of luck to the team tasked with doing this.
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Republicans have a short memory. They reelected a guy who tried to usurp an election, after all.
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Judging by your comment you never handled a complex database system?
Just documenting the functionality of the existing system will take considerable time. There is no magic wand. LLMs can help, but they don't replace the human brain just yet.
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I saw where (USAToday) Elon was going to leaving DOGe this spring. That mean he can take the credit for fixing the SSA code, but he will be long gone when the fix breaks / doesn't work. This man is a wiz. /s
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Although the Fed gov has spent 7.5% more so far this year compared with the same timeframe in 2024.
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This is exactly what happened at my previous employer. A high-level exec came in and brought a bunch of his tech cronies to "migrate to the cloud" and save a TON of money. They got part of the way through it, found out that moving the multi-petabyte DB was too expensive\difficult. They gave up, took credit for the cost savings my team made on our on-prem modernization project and left everyone in the lurch when they quit to do the exact same thing at a medical company that shall remain nameless.
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Voted for Harris, volunteered for Harris. I tried. Now I wash my hands of the mess. Fixing this isn’t something I can do.
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I hope they go through with it.
All the fox-addled elderly folks who punched the card for this mess need to touch the stove.
All the fox-addled elderly folks who punched the card for this mess need to touch the stove.
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Seems like an excellent project for vibe coding. Just let the AI write it and move on.
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Some of the adults are still there, really trying to guide these morons from causing max damage.
That, however, will change. No one has the stamina for a never-ending on-fire death march. And you won't even get a bonus - you will just get blamed and fired.
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There is exactly 0.00000000000% chance of success here, at least from the perspective of the users and owners (that would be US little peeps).
I just migrated a similar, albeit smaller, system. The one I just did was a mainframe with about 10 million lines of code and handled a large (very large) city. Good luck Elon.
I just migrated a similar, albeit smaller, system. The one I just did was a mainframe with about 10 million lines of code and handled a large (very large) city. Good luck Elon.
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It's being done by a man and his cabal who have no clue what coding is all about, remember the "250 year olds receiving benefits" tweet?
If you don't understand the system to possibly figure out why that might have happened, you probably are going to make a huge mess of the system.
And given the rules around SS are going to be that recipients will have to visit a SSA office periodically (of which DOGE has closed many of their offices by firing everyone), this is really going to be a huge timebomb exploding in a few months.
The "FO" part of "FAFO" hasn't come yet. We've seen only minor explosions so far, but the administration in 2 months has set so many timebombs that they're only going to go off in the coming months and years. Some big ones should go off around the midterms.
We're going to see some farm closures around the fall harvest season, for example, thanks to USAID cancelling a ton of contracts, as well as IRA (inflation reduction act) payments not coming that were supposed to happen to help pay for farm upgrades. Now those farmers aren't getting paid for upgrades they made and are in debt.
Things with long and weird supply chains will take time to wrangle and unravel. The auto industry, for example is so intertwined between Canada, Mexico and the US (thanks to decades of NAFTA, and CUSMA) that people have tried to calculate the content and have given up.
What's the American content of a piston in an engine? The aluminum comes from Quebec, is smelted in Ontario, is cast in Michigan, machined in Michigan, is assembled into an engine in Windsor, and put into a truck in Detroit. If you go by metal origin, it's 100% Canadian. But that's assuming Michigan played no part in the casting, machining and final assembly.. (If you think it's wasteful, remember than the parts going back and forth are only spending about 15 minutes between Detroit and Windsor - the border is merely a line in the greater metropolitan region). Repeat for the thousands of parts in a vehicle.
I mean, if Musk wants a challenge, I hear the IRS has been trying to modernize their IT systems for decades and failing spectacularly. And that's an administration where they want the IT help. But I'm guessing there's a chance they'd screw it up and suddenly billionaires will owe billions of dollars in taxes.
If you don't understand the system to possibly figure out why that might have happened, you probably are going to make a huge mess of the system.
And given the rules around SS are going to be that recipients will have to visit a SSA office periodically (of which DOGE has closed many of their offices by firing everyone), this is really going to be a huge timebomb exploding in a few months.
The "FO" part of "FAFO" hasn't come yet. We've seen only minor explosions so far, but the administration in 2 months has set so many timebombs that they're only going to go off in the coming months and years. Some big ones should go off around the midterms.
We're going to see some farm closures around the fall harvest season, for example, thanks to USAID cancelling a ton of contracts, as well as IRA (inflation reduction act) payments not coming that were supposed to happen to help pay for farm upgrades. Now those farmers aren't getting paid for upgrades they made and are in debt.
Things with long and weird supply chains will take time to wrangle and unravel. The auto industry, for example is so intertwined between Canada, Mexico and the US (thanks to decades of NAFTA, and CUSMA) that people have tried to calculate the content and have given up.
What's the American content of a piston in an engine? The aluminum comes from Quebec, is smelted in Ontario, is cast in Michigan, machined in Michigan, is assembled into an engine in Windsor, and put into a truck in Detroit. If you go by metal origin, it's 100% Canadian. But that's assuming Michigan played no part in the casting, machining and final assembly.. (If you think it's wasteful, remember than the parts going back and forth are only spending about 15 minutes between Detroit and Windsor - the border is merely a line in the greater metropolitan region). Repeat for the thousands of parts in a vehicle.
I mean, if Musk wants a challenge, I hear the IRS has been trying to modernize their IT systems for decades and failing spectacularly. And that's an administration where they want the IT help. But I'm guessing there's a chance they'd screw it up and suddenly billionaires will owe billions of dollars in taxes.
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'Should I trust a brilliant tech entrepreneur ' Yes. Do you know one?
They're not 'unnamed "experts"'... They're Musk and his shite company Doge... They've never succeeded at anything.
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I vacillate between, this is just an attempt to move the country back to pre-Johnson and his great society program and Trump, or the people behind him, trying to break the country and move it to be behind Russa. The first option only leaves many starving and poor white man being better off than the poor black man. The second option might involve mass deaths and fighting in the streets. Don't say this is what I signed up for I didn't vote for President Trump, and yes I voted.
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that would be a slight chance they’d accidentally ‘fix’ it and and suddenly the billions of dollars in back taxes that billionaires have dodged, evaded, avoided embezzled will be recognized and charged
no way they’ll risk that
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It’s likely that few in this comment thread voted for it. In a system where recent presidential election popular votes tend to end up pretty close to 50/50, half the voters didn’t vote for it, but have to live with the results anyway. Actually worse than that - because of the electoral college, the popular vote winner can lose, and has 5 times, including twice in the last 25 years (both won by Republicans, including Trump in 2016).
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This. I’ve been around that block many times, with coworkers both good and bad. Rewriting a system that large with a handful of inexperienced arrogant junior devs, and no PMs, will be a nightmare. Security holes, scaling issues, outright functional stupidities, spaghetti code, copy/paste waste, …. it’s going to have it all.
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A good number of small and medium size banks are still depending on COBOL doing deposits, loans, GL etc. t the client side had been replaced numerous times with modern application Ms written in modern language. Java floating point calculation will cause inaccurate interests calculation over time.
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Elections or not, that's how you get rioting in the streets. I don't think they've solidified power that well yet to be able to quell that.
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I am legitimately curious what exactly the breaking point would be for Trump's base to break with him. I see people who are facing the bankruptcy of their farms and businesses as well as people with deported family members who pray to Trump to intercede on their behalf. I see others who say that they're about to be ruined, but always caveat it by saying they believe in Trump.
I am honestly curious how much it would take before they break.
I am honestly curious how much it would take before they break.
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An anecdote from before I retired. I was tasked with leading a project to rewrite an old program done in VB. It's task was to do some calculations for manufacturing. An enthusiastic underling decided to rewrite 2,000 lines of VB code that did the core calculation. (He was tasked with designing the new UI.)
I asked him if he knew how the code worked... He said he didn't.
I wrote the algorithm from scratch simply based on what it was supposed to solve. (a genetic algorithm fit the bill)
That's my expectation here. Some 'we can do anything' types who don't know COBAL jumping in blind.
I asked him if he knew how the code worked... He said he didn't.
I wrote the algorithm from scratch simply based on what it was supposed to solve. (a genetic algorithm fit the bill)
That's my expectation here. Some 'we can do anything' types who don't know COBAL jumping in blind.
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No offense, but I think you're being incredibly optimistic. The very best I expect will be Russian-style "elections" with a preordained outcome. The GQP might not even bother with that.
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A large amount of seniors rely 100% on social security. I think once they're homeless they may wake up.
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Login to SSA.GOV and download a copy of your earning record. That has a complete history of your SS payments, ever since you started. Mine goes back 40 years to when I was in the Army.
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they’re working on it
Mr Miller and Rubio .. and the rest of the clowns
Generals fired, judges intimidated or purchased, law firms caved, FBI purged, police and ice boosted, US military re-stationed to domestic policing under guise of border security, wartime powers of rendition claimed and. executed and so much more
I worried we may soon find out just how much power they have solidified
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COBOL is ridiculously verbose for a coding language. It's not too far off writing instructions in plain English that anybody can read.
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Except that:
1. He isn't brilliant. He's just a rich idiot.
2. His record is mostly failure. His "successes" were using his money to buy into something somebody else created.
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