LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL

Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn't. Don't dis teen coders.

In before Musk says "You think the government uses COBOL?!"

The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.

This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.

For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.

How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.

I can't wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.

Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.

More specifically, they didn't find anyone receiving social security who were 150 years old because they didn't prove that they were receiving anything as that's not the purpose of that database.

Honestly, if you make it to 150 you deserve the money

I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.

And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.

learn Cobol you uneducated teenagers

tbf it's only embarrassing if you're capable of embarrassment.

But but it's BREAKING! With a red light emoji!

https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh

1. There is no "date" data type in COBOL. Dates are stored however the programmer wants, but usually numeric character strings
2. There's no "default" date, even if there were such a data type
3. Even if there were a default, 1875 would be a bizarre choice

That (obviously) doesn't mean Elon Musk is right. It just means that this explanation of it being some magical COBOL epoch value is wrong. What's more likely is that the Social Security database is very old and has a lot of iffy data in it.

My guess is that it contains everybody who has ever had a social security record, including all the duplicates, all the typos, and everything else. At some point there were probably hundreds of thousands of records that were transcribed from paper into a computer, and it was considered safer to keep the iffy data and make a plan to deal with it later, vs. remove someone from the database who should legitimately be there.

I would also imagine that the systems that take the records out of the DB probably have filters in place that remove the (known) bad records before they're used.

Eejit...

As someone who is working on a project of recreating an enterprise application in a modern tech stack, the legacy code is hard to understand too.

We have something similar in that a ClaimClosedDate is defaulted to 01/01/1900 and if it has that date it means it’s not closed whereas now that would be a nullable field.