DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase In Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
This kind of rebuild-the-complex-system-from-scratch thing is always really tempting, and generally a complete disaster.
Archived copies of the article:
So we will have to rebuild it again in four years to remove all the backdoors put in place
Exactly, its like having a Ransomware hacker working directly for the government.
More like the department will be crippled for years. The replaced code will not work, corrupting data. I fully expect them to make it hard to replace the new stuff with the older systems which has tens of millions of moving parts.
The damage will be so great that people applying for social security a generation from now will still feel aftereffects
You are optimistically assuming that they have something working in four years.
tHEy wOn’T TouCh sOCiAL SecUriTy, thAT’s CraZy
so, so many people that I’ve talked to.
Stop being surprised. They made a playbook. The posted it online 5 years ago. They said they’d follow it. They are following it. They will continue to follow it. This is not a surprise. You’re not allowed to be surprised.
I can't imagine there's a huge overlap between people seeing this comment and people who said they wouldn't touch social security. The people this needs to be yelled at aren't getting their news online (at least not the ones I've interacted with).
I know that. This is me just expressing my frustration.
This is insane and stupid and tells me there's no one involved in the process that has ever managed a software project before, which makes it doubly insane and stupid.
Of course a fresh out of college hotshot thinks they can complete a major coding project in 3 months. That's why no one takes their estimates seriously, not announces them to the world.
Don't worry. The most important part of software development these days is not to make sure the code works and is free of errors, it is to attend the daily standups and the many other "agile" time waster meetings. If the software sends your money to another person instead like the software my company created, they can just fix it in some followup sprint 6 months later. Maybe.
That is the point. He wants it to collapse. Musk has repeatedly talked about how he thinks social security shouldn't exist at all.
Yup. The chaos is the point.
It makes me genuinely wonder if they're going to actually try to reprogram it or just do nothing and say they did.
Another real possibility is Musk ours a small team of three or four fresh college graduates on the job knowing that they'll fail, essentially setting them up to be the fall guys if he can't avoid repercussions.
Either way the goal is not to benefit the people who rely on social security.
We all know how good Musk is with timelines... how full self driving going?
We were supposed to go to Mars 10 years ago!
Do you think Musk will use the right glue this time?
... Ok then.
My only income is SSDI.
... Guess its time to set up a go fund me or my cash app tag in my profile or something...
This is not how you do software and infrastructure upgrades. If Elmo and brain cell one that was not riddled with drugs he would know this.
The thing that kills government IT projects is Scale. Any beginner can whip up some forms in Access, but to get a thing like that to work on a national scale, most components need to be hand-crafted and -optimized.
A lot of stuff seems to start breaking around 5 or 6 digit numbers of users.
Been there, seen that. Ages ago, I got a customers database project on my desk. Trying to add an entry threw the server into a frenzy, from which he did not return. It was the 65537th entry...
Many network applications break at 64512 (or a bunch less) concurrent users. Guess why.
I've seen my fair shit pieces of programming in over 40 years at the keyboard...
Plus it will have all the usual edge case errors of software thrown together by some code monkey trying to make his "agile" arbitrary sprint deadline. Most places these days use a software development process that minimizes quality and maximizes bugs.
Move fast to give billionaires gigantic tax cuts and break Social Security!
Oh yea. And to speed things up, they will use AI for doing parts of the software. It will have the most bugs, and nobody really has an idea what the software does. Or how.
It's taken my team months to stand up a vendor product, that's been installed by at least a dozen customers in similar sized businesses, with half a dozen vendor reps on-call 24/7.
After many months of DOGE completely restructuring SS: “Oops, sorry! We accidentally wired all your money to Israel.”
I'm going to guess these geniuses will use MS Access.
Because that worked so well with Twitter. Or going to Mars. Or Tesla.
Only this time it's so much worse. Goddammit this is all so dark.
Collapse is already starting. Many banks release SS checks several days before the official date, but they haven't arrived this month yet. Normally it shows up around the 26-28th, but it still hasn't. I asked my bank about it, and they said that soon they will have to release the checks on the official date, the 3rd. I use my SS to pay my rent, so this means that instead of my rent consistently being a few days early, it will consistently be a few days late.
They want to kill SS, and this is the first step. Once we are used to losing our early release, it will start coming a day or two late. Then a week late. People will be upset, but it will eventually show up, so they'll calm down. Then one month it will be skipped altogether, then go back to normal. Then it will happen again, until people will not be able to count on SS being reliable.
That's when they will say that the system is broken, and it should be cancelled immediately, and a new system will be developed, just like the MAGA Health Care plan. A decade of saying the new plan will be the best plan in the world, and its coming any minute, only to be told after a decade that they only have "concepts of a plan."
LOLOL. 100% success, I don't see any issues with this whatsoever. Musk's track record on such promises certainly is airtight, and his little Hitler Youth engineering team surely has this under control.