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  3. DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

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  • O [email protected]
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    [email protected]
    wrote on last edited by
    #103

    Wont happen legacy systems more complicated than expected, well it wont happen functionally....

    O 1 Reply Last reply
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    • O [email protected]
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      wrote on last edited by
      #104

      if (!=white) {benefits=false}

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      • O [email protected]
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        wrote on last edited by
        #105

        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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        • B [email protected]

          if (!=white) {benefits=false}

          A This user is from outside of this forum
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          wrote on last edited by
          #106

          Nah I think it will just be

          const benefits = false;
          
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          • ? Guest

            refactor is one thing, rewrite everything in a new language is another thing.

            A This user is from outside of this forum
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            wrote on last edited by
            #107

            Yet it's the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.

            F 1 Reply Last reply
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            • B [email protected]

              COBOL is the career advise you hear people give for people who want to make money but don't want to deal with the VC clownshow. COBOL btw is only 13 years older than C and both language's current standard dates to 2023.

              It's at its core a bog-standard procedural language, with some special builtins making it particularly suited to do mainframe stuff. Learning COBOL is no worse a career investment than learning ABAP, or any other language of the bureaucracy. Sure you'll be a career bureaucrat but that's up sufficiently many people's alley, no "move fast and break things", it's "move slowly and keep things running".

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              wrote on last edited by
              #108

              The attractiveness of learning it was that you could avoid boom and bus cycles of retrenchment and clowns like Elon musk. Unfortunately that isn't true anymore so I think once the dust settles, finding people willing to specialize in tech like this is going to get real hard.

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              • C [email protected]

                Bold of you to assume they'll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.

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                wrote on last edited by
                #109

                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.

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                • corkyskog@sh.itjust.worksC [email protected]

                  What's "vibe programming"?

                  A This user is from outside of this forum
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                  wrote on last edited by
                  #110

                  It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.

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                  • K [email protected]

                    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
                    E This user is from outside of this forum
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                    wrote on last edited by
                    #111

                    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?

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                    • A [email protected]

                      Is that true everywhere or just in the US? I know that, at least a few years ago, a bunch of banking software in the US was still in COBOL but parts of Western Europe were modernizing their banking industry. I'm probably going back to school for computer science in the fall and had been considering trying to learn COBOL in my free time, or learning more Fortran (I have actually taken a programming class with Fortran, but because it was aimed at beginners it didn't really go in depth, but I bet it'd look good on certain resumes). It's looking like my future is in Europe somewhere, so I'm keeping that in the back of my mind while making decisions.

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                      wrote on last edited by
                      #112

                      I'm not enough into that industry to actually give a good estimate, here, but the amount of COBOL systems still up and running is certainly not even close to non-zero, and it's going to stay that way for a while. From what I gather for companies moving away from COBOL is more of a "programmers are hard to find" situation, not "these systems absolutely must be replaced" one. It's well-supported and scaled with their business, as in, in places they're running the same 60 year old code on new mainframes because if there's one thing that IBM mainframes are then it's excessively backwards-compatible.

                      As far as the language is concerned: It's not hard, it's just weird, dating back from an age where people thought randomly calling things "divisions" would make businesspeople capable coders. The reason I'm not in that space isn't because of the language but because of the type of software you write there, it's all bookkeeping and representing business procedures, as said: Bureaucracy.

                      Also I'm not sure what "modernising" actually meant, there: SEPA instant payment was introduced, meaning that mainframes won't batch up the day's transactions and then talk to each other every night so cross-bank transfers took a day to process, now they're doing it in ten seconds. Most banks already supported instant transfers within their own systems so they should only have had to rewrite the external interface as the rest was already up to the task.

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                      • S [email protected]

                        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.

                        J This user is from outside of this forum
                        J This user is from outside of this forum
                        [email protected]
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #113

                        Yeah, this is going to end in disaster.

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                        • S [email protected]

                          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.

                          T This user is from outside of this forum
                          T This user is from outside of this forum
                          [email protected]
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #114

                          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.

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                          • ? Guest

                            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.

                            J This user is from outside of this forum
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                            wrote on last edited by
                            #115

                            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.

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                            • thepowerofgeek@lemmy.worldT [email protected]

                              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.

                              J This user is from outside of this forum
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                              wrote on last edited by
                              #116

                              They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.

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                              • S [email protected]

                                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.

                                O This user is from outside of this forum
                                O This user is from outside of this forum
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                                wrote on last edited by
                                #117

                                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

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                                • D [email protected]

                                  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?

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                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #118

                                  If Trump is smart, he'll let Musk do all the unpopular project 2025 stuff, then throw him in prison at the end and escape the blame personally. This way he gets to keep popularity with his base while telling his donors they got everything they asked for. It's what all dictators do, really.

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                                  • S [email protected]

                                    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.

                                    R This user is from outside of this forum
                                    R This user is from outside of this forum
                                    [email protected]
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #119

                                    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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                                    • E [email protected]

                                      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?

                                      R This user is from outside of this forum
                                      R This user is from outside of this forum
                                      [email protected]
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #120

                                      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.

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                                      • G [email protected]

                                        This is how you know Musk is a fraud. This far into his career and he’s leading teams into rookie mistakes.

                                        Or, he knows this will break it and that’s the goal. I’m just not sure how he avoids the blame.

                                        ? Offline
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                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #121

                                        DARVO is all you need to avoid blame. Deny. Reverse Victim and Offender. Incredibly effective either way everyone except the genuinely principled.

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                                        • O [email protected]
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                                          panarab@lemm.eeP This user is from outside of this forum
                                          panarab@lemm.eeP This user is from outside of this forum
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                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #122

                                          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.

                                          F T 2 Replies Last reply
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