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
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
Submitted 5 days ago by oakey66@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
Comments
kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 days ago
EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
But dude, bro, we could put the entire system on the blockchain man, and make it super efficient with an AI backend that will remove all errors bro.
Dude it’s not even written in Rust bro. WTF is this dinosaur shit?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t think Rust is a bad language for doing same things people do with C++, but with a smaller standard and less legacy.
But yep, that’s the kind of people.
About dinosaur things - I’ve started learning Tcl/Tk and it’s just wonderful.
futatorius@lemm.ee 5 days ago
It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
There are no such systems. What instead happens is that the surrounding business process gets distorted to work around the unfixed major bugs. And then, everyone involved retires and nobody knows anymore why things are done that way.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 days ago
I know devs like everything to be perfect, but if your business can work around it for 15 years without fixing the bug or replacing the system, I dare say it doesn’t qualify as a major bug.
AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
It 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.
peteyestee@feddit.org 3 days ago
AI is going to write it.
adminofoz@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
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.
Agent641@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Australian here.
They are robbing you
Etterra@discuss.online 5 days ago
We know. Those of us who are paying attention, anyway.
db2@lemmy.world 5 days ago
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
green@feddit.nl 4 days ago
Therapist: Stop being silly, you can’t hear emojis.
^ the emojis
Telorand@reddthat.com 5 days ago
How this will go:
“Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python.”
“Certainly! Here you go.”
System crashes and exposes all Americans’ SSNs
“Fuckin’ DEI hires…!”
frezik@midwest.social 4 days ago
“ROFL”
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
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.
dryfter@lemm.ee 3 days ago
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.
monkeyman512@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
andallthat@lemmy.world 4 days ago
With Grok looking more and more like the only one working for Musk with enough (digital) balls to stand to to his boss, that might be better than the alternative of “Big Balls” and the rest of the Digital Oblivous Goons of Elon
skozzii@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
They have an experienced team of teenagers don’t worry.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
That is the mother load of all code bases. Probably still some COBOL if not mostly cobol.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
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.
peteyestee@feddit.org 3 days ago
By rebuild I don’t think they mean it’s going to function the same. …just torn apart and replaced.
frezik@midwest.social 3 days ago
It has to function the same. It has to follow the same laws as before.
Bur more likely, they know this and it’s all part of privatizing social security.
PiJiNWiNg@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
The first step towards privatizing an industry is eroding public confidence in the existing program. They have absolutely no intention of improving the program, they just want to make it shitty enough that people stop believing in it. Once that happens, 45 will start shilling, and some lucky company will swoop in and take it over.
Textbook…
will_a113@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Yep, this is it. Show how “broken” it is by breaking it, and enough of the population won’t even notice when it’s “fixed” and they’re only getting 2/3 of what they were before (and are entitled to). Plus grift, etc.
normalexit@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve worked on teams converting legacy code for most of my life. The planning for something like this would take longer than six months.
If this proceeds in Trump’s corrupt government, Elon will get the contact, will claim it is too broken to salvage, and will privatize it. The only way this goes anywhere is if Trump and musk stand to gain money, and they stand to gain a lot.
misteloct@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If they planned a 1 month migration of a small component, 6 months to complete would be pretty lucky imo.
normalexit@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Just determining the requirements would be a nightmare.
suite403@lemmy.world 5 days 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.
null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days 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 5 days 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.
DrainKikoLake@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
suite403@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yea, that’s a mich better way of putting it.
oppy1984@lemm.ee 5 days ago
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
Treczoks@lemmy.world 5 days 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 5 days ago
Yeah, I’ve cleaned up the messes that idiots like that have left.
jonne@infosec.pub 5 days ago
Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 days 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.
Crashumbc@lemmy.world 5 days ago
These comments are completely missing the truth.
They have zero intention of rebuilding anything, this is just an excuse to destroy SSA …
undeffeined@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
This is my suspicion as well.
nthavoc@lemmy.today 5 days ago
They’re not rebuilding anything. They’re just adding back doors everywhere. If anyone hasn’t learned yet, these are crackpot script kiddies at best. Even If somehow control is take away from them, they are now going to definitely have to redo the entire thing to make sure none of their shit code survives.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
AT BEST it’s gonna be some ridiculous npm svalbard worth of projects in one tree, require all new hardware, and declare bankruptcy on the way. Canada did this with the Phoenix Pay System, except didn’t have ‘efficient’ funding so it only sucked but didn’t die.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 days ago
No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.
Tuxman@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
“…but sir, we only know Node.js…”
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
i hope elon and the entire “doge” team dies. i really do.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This is just another step down “I honestly just can’t comprehend the stupidity of what is going on in the American government”-alley…
renrenPDX@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Oh no, he wants to “rebuild the stack” from the ground up again.
samuelazers@lemmy.world 5 days ago
step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has contract elon musk for code maintenance forever step 3. profit
Civil_Liberty@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I’m less than a decade from taking my SS early. I have already downloaded my SS deduction tables from their website in anticipation of them doing something this stupid. “Oh… you think you are eligible for earned benefits? We can’t seem to locate your contribution history… so sorry for you.”
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 4 days ago
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.
Gerudo@lemm.ee 5 days ago
Months? I don’t k ow how to code, and even I know that’s impossible.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Gonna blow up the database as many times as they blow up SpaceX rockets.
PanArab@lemm.ee 5 days ago
COBOL is perfectly suitable for financial purposes for which it was designed. The SSA code has gone through decades worth of changes and improvements that cannot be replicated even in 10 years.
baatliwala@lemmy.world 5 days ago
if (!=white) {benefits=false}
Dragomus@lemmy.world 5 days ago
If it fails spectaculairly who will take the blame? Will there be any repercussions at all?
Or will Musk and Trump shrug their shoulders? Halfheartedly blame Biden for badly programming the original database then go play some golf/videogaminges?
dzso@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This clusterfck has me seriously considering whether taxes are quite as certain as death anymore.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
I’m sure having a corrupt non-government narcissist rewrite the code for SS will be fine. It’s not like he could leave any code hidden in there for his own purposes, like controlling or redirecting payments or anything.
KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee 4 days ago
Hey asshole - it works - don’t fix it.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 5 days ago
riskingguaranteeingelatedCatfish@lemm.ee 3 days ago
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
einlander@lemmy.world 5 days ago
This idea is terrifying in the most insidious ways. Who has access to the code? Who is auditing the code? Are they putting in code that may disenfranchise “the right people”. How long will it take to come to light? When found out, provided ‘Adults’ are running the country again, how much and how long would it take to fix it? And what backdoors are in the code?
This is bad news all around.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Ah yes, a classic tale…
“We’re going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we’ll do it in a few months!”
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There’s are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they’ll do it in Waterfall too.
It’s interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It’s just fucking traffic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to do many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
zqwzzle@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Image
criss_cross@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I’ve worked on these “cost saving” government rewrites before. The problem is getting decades of domain logic and behavior down to where people can be productive. It takes a lot of care and nuance to do this well.
Since these nazi pea brains can’t even secure a db properly I have my doubts they’ll do this successfully.
gedhrel@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it’s like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I’ve seen of production cobol) a “common trick” in lots of real-world deployments.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.
Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”
Telorand@reddthat.com 5 days ago
My company actually wrote their flagship software in COBOL starting in the 80s, and we’re only now six years into rewriting everything in a more modern language with probably four years to go.
I can’t imagine trying to start such a project like rewriting all of Social Security and thinking it will take months. You have to be a special kind of fatuous to unironically think that.
7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
screams in quality assurance
DJKJuicy@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Nah B. This will be Extreme Agile XP with testing exclusively in Prod. Xitter will be the code repository.
ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Pair programming with Grok.
Spotty DOGE intern developer: “what’s a for loop?”
Grok: “Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!”
futatorius@lemm.ee 4 days ago
I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.
My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
What’s “vibe programming”?
rikudou@lemmings.world 5 days ago
Stupid term for when people who don’t know how to program ask AI to generate code for them which they have no expertise to actually validate.
golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
It’s when people try to have LLM’s generate code and then try to assemble the pieces produced into semi-functional, usually really bad, software I think.
acchariya@lemmy.world 5 days ago
It’s understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
Bold of you to assume they’ll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.
acchariya@lemmy.world 5 days ago
We all know it’s going to be nodejs, backed up by mongodb. This is because LOC on the commits can be maximized for minimal effort, and it will need to be rewritten every 2-3 years.
jonne@infosec.pub 5 days ago
They’re not going to use Java, it’s going to be typescript.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Or Rust