This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn’t perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
It’s not a case of “seeing the code isn’t perfect” but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.
I’m reminded of this shitshow:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation
Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.
I’m an accountant by trade, there’s a classic “techbro does accounting” style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn’t spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude “it’s just a database with some rules”.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Ow, my sides.
If you want the source of any future “technical glitches”, it’s this wilfully negligent act. Courts, take note.
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If SS payments stop, there will be hundreds of thousands of people with nothing left to lose.
Suicide bombers on mobility scooters. Be very afraid.
Over 70 million including many retirees, orphans, and disabled workers. The people most in need of help and the reason that trying to run a government like a capitalist business is one of the dumbest forms of government organization ever. A quick way to radicalize someone against you is to harm their family or take their money.
My mom is over 80. Little old suburban white lady. She already volunteered - “Just get me close.” She’d be super-thrilled to have her shot with a suicide vest.
I also know a 93-year-old lady who has loudly talked about taking a few of the bastards with her. The sentiment may be more widespread than we think.
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
“ROFL”
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
Yep, months is a joke, doubly so when talking about tens of millions of lines of code and also COBOL specifically.
This is going to be a hilarious disaster but not so hilarious when people who need the benefits need them and won’t be able to get them.
To be fair. We assume “months” means less than 2 years. But 10 years can also be “months”, and is probably a more realistic timeline.
Nobody is referring to 10 years as “months”.
When you’re talking about multiples of years, it’s going to be called years, not months. They were obviously talking about a short timeline, less than 2 years, likely less than 1 year.
They have no idea what they’re talking about.
Like I said, months is a joke.
So was what I said. I was presenting a hypothetical way they justify their ridiculous claims by doing something else ridiculous.
But conveying tone in text is difficult, so I’m not surprised you missed what I was going for.
I’m on SSDI (and Medicaid and HUD housing) and have been having insane anxiety the last month and a half to the point that I’m wondering if I’ll even get paid in April. I regularly check my SSA account online to make sure my direct deposit is still freaking scheduled. Missing a payment could mess up all of my other benefits as well.
I know the fuck up is coming, but I don’t know if I can handle another few months hoping they don’t fuck up the migration if they don’t fuck up just paying people first with all that’s been going on.
I’m pretty sure Im not the only one in this situation who can’t handle the stress of this bullshit.
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.
How this will go:
DOGE: “Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python.”
Dumb AI: “Certainly! Here you go.”
System crashes and exposes all Americans’ SSNs
DOGE: “Fuckin’ DEI hires…!”
They’re really playing with fire here.
So many MAGA supporters are seniors who are entirely dependent on OASDI. If Trump’s minions break this, we’re going to see torches and pitchforks strapped to electric scooters and golf carts coming out of Florida retirement communities in droves.
No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.
“…but sir, we only know Node.js…”
Musk would probably think that’s just fine.
Server-side javascript is an abomination, but there’s more of it around than you might think.
Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.
Just no man.
Yes, JavaScript has been the most popular language but it is exclusively because of the front-end. Many companies do not want to pay for separate back-end devs and ask their front-end devs to do it instead. These people (ab)use JS because they’re most comfortable with it and are under crunch; so we end up with the abomination that is back-end JS.
It is NOT rivaling much lower-level languages; it can’t even rival C#.
First off, it is interpreted. You are never going to be faster than competently written C, C++, Go, nor Rust. Secondly, the resources it takes to exist makes in a non-option for embedded machines - which Social-Security facilities are all but guaranteed to use.
Not to mention the horrendous (and insecure) package infrastructure, and under-powered core libraries - it would be the fullest extent disaster.
The saddest part? The larpers at DOG(shit)E are all but guaranteed to pick the worst tools for the job, over-engineer, and have extremely poor management. Meaning whatever they ship WILL collaspe the system day 1; and all of the people refusing to pay attention will be like “hOw CouLd THis HaPPen”
I was only responding to the idea that no one should ever use NodeJS, as it’s good as a web server.
A Honda Civic is a great car for what it’s built for and people know how to drive it. But I wouldn’t use it to haul gravel or drive the Indy 500.
Gonna blow up the database as many times as they blow up SpaceX rockets.
Sooo only gonna blow up the test databases?
In theory, it wouldn’t be a necessarily bad idea to port the COBOL code to something more modern, but I cannot trust Muskrat and a few vibe coder youngsters with this task.
Bro. Check it out bro, we’re gonna like make it this dope Electron app, bro. It’ll interface with X, bro and everyone will have to login there to get their money, bro. Don’t worry tho, you’ll get paid in recession-proof Trumpbux crypto currency as long as you claim it in time. But X gets a fee of 60% bro.
Seriously bro we like hired a bunch of grads that took a one week X created code boot camp that like you know revolved around a language big balls created called “cyber coin purse++”. On second thought bro we’re rewriting it in that. Should be like 2 weeks to rewrite it cuz old people wrote the current code and they’re like old or whatever bro. Like I live in an old person’s basement and they’re just like old, bro.
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
This has the stench of junior engineer all over it. This rewrite will go way over budget and come limping across the finish line late, with more bugs and less features than the system it replaces. I guarantee it.
AI is going to write it.
1000% percent. If they can’t even figure out how dates work in COBOL we are getting a vibe coded SSA. Let’s hope they trained LLMs on COBOL or we are cooked.
Australian here.
They are robbing you
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Therapist: Stop being silly, you can’t hear emojis.
^ the emojis
Wait, emojis are audible?
