DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months
Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27501204
It would be funny except for all the old people who are going to stop getting checks and find out Musk closed their local SS office.
I thought they were working on establishing ss offices
kek
Agreed. But my first thought was
If there's one thing you want in a website used by almost 75 million beneficiaries it's a platform hastily put together by a crack team of geniuses--that don't password protect databases--"in months."
This is gonna go very very very poorly.
Well maybe the beneficiaries can edit their benefits themselves?
I've been party to dumping legacy systems and lift & shifts a few times.
Good fucking luck.
Knowing nothign about this, a project like this would take at least 2 years even if you are dropping a ton of use cases and dependencies.
I wonder if it will be web scale
Agreed (context: same legacy system work, 20 years), although given the size and scale of the tech debt involved, I'd peg it at 5 years if you had a team of 100+ COBOL developers.
10 to do it right.
Once you start dealing with databases older than SQL and languages older than C, things get funky real fast.
Years are made of months … Good read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
Years are made of months … Good read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
More than just a good read, that's one of the project/programming Ten Commandments.
Can't tell you how many times over the decades I've had to argue with project managers about that.
Also a good pen is the report, we need three months for this, only to be told each week something else is more important. After the three month the question came is it finished now.
And so 2 Years turned to 6.
This is going to be such a ridiculous disaster that it'd be entertaining to watch it go to shit — if it weren't such a critical system they're fucking with.
Remember when people thought Elmo knew anything?
I 'member.
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
OMG like when he said the universe was definitely a simulation because he’d read it in a pop science article and the MSM reported it as an Important Story.
We also got fully self driving cars in 2 years though, in 2016....
I'm posting this from Mars colony. Amazing isn't it.
Calling it now - it will be written in such a way that Musk’s motley crew will be required to maintain it or update proprietary closed source components at extreme cost forever - practically guaranteeing he will always have full access to the data and be able to charge what he likes for any changes whoever takes power after Trump is gone.
It's going to be written using vibe programming
In JavaScript ⛈️⚡⚡⛈️⛈️ (Imagine this is like, a scary thunderstorm or smth, to add atmosphere to the words, idk)
Can't wait to hear how the blockchain will factor into this redesign.
I mean, technically SSA data might be a legitimate use of the blockchain. I am one of the biggest opponents of the whole mess, but there are use cases for a persistent immutable data record, and social security numbers would be one of them.
My heart breaks for cool ideas that got taken by scammers and are now forever associated with financial predators and will probably never see legitimate use.
Distributed blockchains are useful when all of the below are fulfilled:
- Need for distributed ledger
- Peers are adversarial w.r.t. contents of transactions in the ledger
- Enough peers exist so that no group can become a majority and thus assume control
- No trusted central authority exists
Here, we have a single peer creating entries in a ledger. We can get away with a copy of the ledger and one or more trusted timestamping authorities.
We tried guys, really we did. The vibe coding was working but it was sabotaged by liberals and Canadians. The only option is to end social security and put the poor and elderly into workhouses or send them to the shower blocks.
This is going to really help government efficiency!
Someone please make a backup