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.
  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
    5·
    5 days ago

    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.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        4·
        4 days ago

        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…

    • btaf45@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      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!

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 days ago

        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.