• AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    87·
    6 days ago

    This has the stench of junior engineer all over it. This rewrite 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.

      • adminofoz@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        3·
        5 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.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
      34·
      6 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.eeEnglish
        6·
        5 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.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 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.

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          Nobody is referring to 10 years as “months”.

          When you’re talking about multiples of years, it’s going to be called years, not months. They were obviously talking about a short timeline, less than 2 years, likely less than 1 year.

          They have no idea what they’re talking about.

          Like I said, months is a joke.

          • monkeyman512@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            5 days ago

            So was what I said. I was presenting a hypothetical way they justify their ridiculous claims by doing something else ridiculous.

            But conveying tone in text is difficult, so I’m not surprised you missed what I was going for.

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.caEnglish
      25·
      6 days ago

      Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      5 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.orgEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      By rebuild I don’t think they mean it’s going to function the same. …just torn apart and replaced.

      • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 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.

    • Simulation6@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      61·
      6 days ago

      That is the mother load of all code bases. Probably still some COBOL if not mostly cobol.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    1302·
    7 days ago

    There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:

    1. It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
    2. It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
    • britaliope@kourjetez.bzhEnglish
      32·
      7 days ago

      Also : it’s very complex and it happens to work fine for decades.

      If one day i write a code project and manage to make it work without any major issues for several decades, there is no way i attemptto rewrite it.

      • jonne@infosec.pubEnglish
        17·
        6 days ago

        Yeah, there’s almost 100 years of law, case law and agency regulations built into how this software works. And they fired all the people that knew anything about it.

    • EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      20·
      7 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.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 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.eeEnglish
      4·
      6 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.socialEnglish
        3·
        6 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.

  • normalexit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    46·
    6 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 contract, 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.worldEnglish
      8·
      6 days ago

      If they planned a 1 month migration of a small component, 6 months to complete would be pretty lucky imo. Refactoring Legacy Code mentions the 2.0 approach they’re taking. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t work…

  • Suite404@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    7 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.comEnglish
      231·
      6 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:

      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”.

      • morbidcactus@lemmy.caEnglish
        81·
        6 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.

        • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          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.

        • futatorius@lemm.eeEnglish
          31·
          6 days ago

          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.

    • oppy1984@lemm.eeEnglish
      201·
      6 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.worldEnglish
      81·
      6 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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 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.

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    6 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.

      • monkeyman512@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        6 days ago

        The reason is that it takes a lot of emotional intelligence and strength to admit that you have been scammed. These people will find it less emotionally painful to deny reality then admit their mistakes.

    • orcrist@lemm.eeEnglish
      41·
      6 days ago

      Yes. They need to move quickly. Public opinion is already shifting against Trump and Musk, and right now they are vulnerable.

  • Crashumbc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    7 days ago

    These comments are completely missing the truth.

    They have zero intention of rebuilding anything, this is just an excuse to destroy SSA …

  • nthavoc@lemmy.todayEnglish
    53·
    7 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.caEnglish
      17·
      7 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.

    • futatorius@lemm.eeEnglish
      162·
      6 days ago

      Musk would probably think that’s just fine.

      Server-side javascript is an abomination, but there’s more of it around than you might think.

      • NeonKnight52@lemmy.caEnglish
        715·
        6 days ago

        Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.

        • green@feddit.nlEnglish
          19·
          6 days ago

          Just no man.

          Yes, JavaScript has been the most popular language but it is exclusively because of the front-end. Many companies do not want to pay for separate back-end devs and ask their front-end devs to do it instead. These people (ab)use JS because they’re most comfortable with it and are under crunch; so we end up with the abomination that is back-end JS.

          It is NOT rivaling much lower-level languages; it can’t even rival C#.

          First off, it is interpreted. You are never going to be faster than competently written C, C++, Go, nor Rust. Secondly, the resources it takes to exist makes in a non-option for embedded machines - which Social-Security facilities are all but guaranteed to use.

          Not to mention the horrendous (and insecure) package infrastructure, and under-powered core libraries - it would be the fullest extent disaster.

          The saddest part? The larpers at DOG(shit)E are all but guaranteed to pick the worst tools for the job, over-engineer, and have extremely poor management. Meaning whatever they ship WILL collaspe the system day 1; and all of the people refusing to pay attention will be like “hOw CouLd THis HaPPen”

          • NeonKnight52@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            I was only responding to the idea that no one should ever use NodeJS, as it’s good as a web server.

            A Honda Civic is a great car for what it’s built for and people know how to drive it. But I wouldn’t use it to haul gravel or drive the Indy 500.

  • samuelazers@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24·
    6 days ago

    step 1. rewrite into spaghetti code

    step 2. nobody understands the new code, so the govt has to contract elon musk for code maintenance forever

    step 3. profit

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    6 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.

    • 800XL@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      6 days ago

      Bro. Check it out bro, we’re gonna like make it this dope Electron app, bro. It’ll interface with X, bro and everyone will have to login there to get their money, bro. Don’t worry tho, you’ll get paid in recession-proof Trumpbux crypto currency as long as you claim it in time. But X gets a fee of 60% bro.

      Seriously bro we like hired a bunch of grads that took a one week X created code boot camp that like you know revolved around a language big balls created called “cyber coin purse++”. On second thought bro we’re rewriting it in that. Should be like 2 weeks to rewrite it cuz old people wrote the current code and they’re like old or whatever bro. Like I live in an old person’s basement and they’re just like old, bro.

    • letzlo@feddit.nlEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      In theory it is a horrible idea. No port like this ever works out. An incremental approach has much higher chance of success but will take long.