I’m less than a decade from taking my SS early. I have already downloaded my SS deduction tables from their website in anticipation of them doing something this stupid. “Oh… you think you are eligible for earned benefits? We can’t seem to locate your contribution history… so sorry for you.”
I’m on SSDI and VA disability. I can’t work. I’m terrified every time they even breath in the direction of either place. I’d be super fucked. Even losing SSDI would destroy us. That’s about 3/4 of our mortgage payment. So many other vets are in the same boat.
how do you do this? probably good for all of us to know
Months? I don’t k ow how to code, and even I know that’s impossible.
they will make chatGPT do it and then not verify.
They will cross-check with Grok.
Vibe Coding. I can’t see a way for this to go wrong…
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?
I think the hope is that it fails, they don’t want social security to work.
Bingo
“Whoops, we pushed to prod and have no backups. Sorrryyyy!”
Oh no, he wants to “rebuild the stack” from the ground up again.
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
This is just another step down “I honestly just can’t comprehend the stupidity of what is going on in the American government”-alley…
Like… what do they even expect to come of this? Why are they even interested in doing it? Is it just to stir up shit?
They are trying to break the government beyond all repair. At that point they’ll say it’s the Democrats that broke it.
Their cult members will swallow the lie hook line and sinker, and continue to keep them in power. (Side note, this will be made easier by gutting all election oversight as part of the package.)
Meanwhile, all that tax money we paid into Social Security, SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, Unemployment insurance… basically any program meant to help people, will flow directly into billionaire’s pockets.
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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.
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 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 tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
Edit: Fixed some typos.
It’s worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they’re the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They’re basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.
Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.
Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don’t) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don’t fully understand about it AND I’ve caused outages because of it.
Non programmer but skilled with computers type guy here: what makes Java well suited for this?
This is probably an incorrect prejudice of mine, but I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster. Didn’t people used to rip on Java for being inefficient and too abstracted?
Last language I had any experience with was C++ in high school programming class in the early 2000s, so I’m very ignorant of anything modern.
I am a programmer but I’m not sure why people think Java is suited for anything, especially a system so sensitive to bugs. It’s so hard to write high quality readable code in Java. Everything is way more clunky, and verbose than it needs to be.
Some major improvements were made with versions 17+ but still, it feels like walking through mud.
It’s a language from the 1990s for the 1990s.
Btw the performance is actually pretty good in Java, the old reputation for slowness is entirely undeserved today.
If it has to be JVM, then Kotlin. Java done properly.
It’s a verbose language but I don’t know if there’s any real language that encourages highly readable code beyond low-level syntax. You want to create a God-class in Python with nonsensical variables and 5 levels of nesting? The language won’t stop you.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
Other than hardware issues, which someone else mentioned, it has a lot of enterprise-grade functionality that make it more secure and auditable than a lot of other languages. And despite, or maybe because of, its large memory footprint it’s actually faster than most languages.
I totally get any hate about writing Java though. It is a verbose language. Using Kotlin instead helps with that.
Java can be pretty damn efficient for long running processes because it optimizes at runtime. It also can use new hardware features (like cpu instructions) without having to compile for specific platforms so in practice it gets a boost there. Honestly, the worst thing about Java is the weird corporate ecosystem that produces factoryfactory and other overengineered esoteric weirdness. It can also do FFI with anything that can bind via c ABI so if some part of the program needed some hand optimized code like something from BLAS it could be done that way.
All that to say it doesn’t matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
Why is there a need to rewrite it at all? Is it because COBOL is basically ancient hieroglyphics to modern programmers thus making it hard to maintain or update?
They want to make buttloads of money from a rewrite, and it would cost buttloads to do this. They probably also want things to run like shit and cause misery for retired Americans.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree it needs to be rewritten. Hiring programmers that are willing to work in cobol would certainly be harder than other languages though, because you’ll have a much smaller candidate pool and people would be unlikely to see learning cobol as a good career investment
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”.
Everything that you said is correct, except the prevalence of the career advice. I would bet most people looking for their first job out of school don’t even know COBOL is a language.
The language isn’t the problem with COBOL, it’s the likelihood that you will be maintaining (not adding to, but maintaining) a software system that may not have any docs and the original implementers are dead. Next, there will be nobody to verify the business rules that are specified in the code. Finally after you make a mistake about a business rule, you will be thrown under the bus.
Refactoring a code base is kinda like general maintenance for the application. Over time deprecated features, temp fixes, etc. start to be a lot of the code base. By cleaning things up you can make it more maintainable, efficient, etc.
That being said, for systems this large you usually fix up parts of it and iterate over time. Trying to do the whole code base is hard cause it’s like replacing the engine while the car is in motion.
No. Java is not suited for this. This code runs on mainframes not some x86 shitbox cluster of dell blades. They literally could not purchase the hardware needed to switch to java in the timeline given. I get what you’re trying to say but in this case Java is a hard no.
Uh, Java is specifically supported by IBM in the Power and Z ISA, and they have both their own distribution, and guides for writing Java programs for mainframes in particular.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because after Cobol, Java is the most enterprise language that has ever enterprised.
How old do you think the mainframes running Social Security are?
Probably a mix of Z systems, that stuff goes back 20-odd years, and even then older code can still run on new Z systems which is something IBM brags about.
Mainframes aren’t old they’re just niche technology, and that includes enterprise Java software.Think further back. Like late 80s to 90s IBM
Yeah, that’s what they said, 20 years or so ago
Functional, yes. But rarely are these sorts of things efficient. They’re covered in decades of cruft and workarounds.
Which just makes them that much harder to port to a different language. Especially by some 19 year old who goes by “Big Balls”
My company actually wrote their flagship software in COBOL starting in the 80s, and we’re only now six years into rewriting everything in a more modern language with probably four years to go.
I can’t imagine trying to start such a project like rewriting all of Social Security and thinking it will take months. You have to be a special kind of fatuous to unironically think that.
Similarly, my company are 4 years into a rewrite of a cobol mainframe system much simpler than Social Security. Which was going to “take a year” there’s at least 5 years left.
I know the UK benefits system took well over 12 years to build with an programming workforce of over 2000 and I imagine it’s simpler having to support a population one fifth the size of the US.
I was briefly employed at a firm that maintained the sales commission software for a large telecom firm.
It was 1.5 million lines of VB6, though VB8 was already three years old. Nobody knew all of it, so they couldn’t possibly rewrite it to handle all the edge cases and special incentives we kept having to add.
Except maybe the lone QA person, who would frequently begin sobbing at her desk. And we could all hear it because it was an open plan office and we weren’t allowed to wear headphones.
That job was so bad I quit and began freelancing.
The kind that thinks full self driving is two years away, perhaps?
AGI is definitely just around the corner! We just need to throw more money and the energy produced by half the country at it!
And work 60hrs a week!
He can’t be this delusional, right? It is almost like he is just trying to inflict damage?
He’s not delusional (with regard to what he’s doing). He wins either way. The government crumbles, he gets to remake it in his image. He fails, he gets to claim he made the government more efficient, and the fact that it’s limping along is just the result of “necessary” pruning.
This is all theater. He doesn’t actually care about the outcome or the American people.
The kind that thinks all those edge cases don’t matter and if they don’t get payments it’s just another example of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
What’s “vibe programming”?
It’s when people try to have LLM’s generate code and then try to assemble the pieces produced into semi-functional, usually really bad, software I think.
And I think “vibe” means that they have no experience with programming so they can’t read the code they copy.
Stupid term for when people who don’t know how to program ask AI to generate code for them which they have no expertise to actually validate.
Edit: It took 20 minutes, but I finally found the poster child for vibe coding (time well spent):
screams in quality assurance
Bold of you to assume they’ll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.
I’ve worked on these “cost saving” government rewrites before. The problem is getting decades of domain logic and behavior down to where people can be productive. It takes a lot of care and nuance to do this well.
Since these nazi pea brains can’t even secure a db properly I have my doubts they’ll do this successfully.
How this will go:
DOGE: “Okay Grok. Convert this COBOL code into Python.”
Dumb AI: “Certainly! Here you go.”
System crashes and exposes all Americans’ SSNs
DOGE: “Fuckin’ DEI hires…!”
“…but sir, we only know Node.js…”
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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.
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”
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
The first step towards privatizing an industry is eroding public confidence in the existing program. They have absolutely no intention of improving the program, they just want to make it shitty enough that people stop believing in it. Once that happens, 45 will start shilling, and some lucky company will swoop in and take it over.
Textbook…
Yep, this is it. Show how “broken” it is by breaking it, and enough of the population won’t even notice when it’s “fixed” and they’re only getting 2/3 of what they were before (and are entitled to). Plus grift, etc.
If you want the source of any future “technical glitches”, it’s this wilfully negligent act. Courts, take note.
That’s the idea. Then they say anyone who complains about not receiving benefits is a fraud.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Ow, my sides.
