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DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse (www.wired.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 51 points 2 years ago (13 children)

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.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    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:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation

    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".

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Oh hey, we had one of those disasters in Canada! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years 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.

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