Comment on DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year agoIt’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”.
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.
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.
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.
Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
Made by IBM.
Hah. It was IBM that was running the shitshow in Queensland too.
suite403@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yea, that’s a mich better way of putting it.