I’m sure the doge boys are expert grock vibe coders, it will be fine, they’ve got big ballz on the team, what could possibly go wrong? /s
Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
suite403@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
oppy1984@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I did such a thing, but I had a big advantage: the codebase had been done by people who had never really learned to code, and I was a seasoned programmer with 20 years of experience.
futatorius@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Yeah, I’ve cleaned up the messes that idiots like that have left.
jonne@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
That happens. Even if said new programmer had seen before that IRL the important part of that codebase consists of specific domain area quirks, scarcely documented and understood. They have an advantage in doing something good for the specific stage of that system’s evolution, but a huge disadvantage in knowing what the hell it really does.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
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:
…wikipedia.org/…/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_s…
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”.
morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
I’ve always known your world is complex, working closely with accountants and actuaries the last 4 years doing data applications further confirmed that, there’s some legitimately complex math that shows up, and it’s a lot of work to model that correctly.
“It’s just a …” Is a redflag to me, project’s going to be a gongshow.
I find that mentality of not trying to understand the problem and its context totally counter to the engineering method.
futatorius@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
Yeah, the “It’s just a…” guy collapses into a fetal-position sobbing heap when you start looking at exception flows, rollbacks, compensating transations, and all the tweaks and tweezes that every workable real accounting system (or any other complex workflow) has.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Yeah, as you’ve said it’s not the complexity that’s the problem, it’s that dunning Kruger style overconfidence that you’re smarter than everyone else and can manage data better than these silly accountants.
DrainKikoLake@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
turnip@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Made by IBM.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Hah. It was IBM that was running the shitshow in Queensland too.
suite403@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yea, that’s a mich better way of putting it.