DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse
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.
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.
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
Ok this is gonna hurt. 2005 was 20 years ago
Do you have reason to think that? Organizations that use mainframes keep them up-to-date in my experience.
Chatty government contractors. I imagine some parts are updated but at least 2 years ago there was still a load of legacy hardware kicking for them to speak of
Old enough to collect benefits themselves
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.
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.
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.
refactor is one thing, rewrite everything in a new language is another thing.
Yet it's the thing every junior dev wants to do as they gain more experience.
Right after they write yet another content management system.
Oh yeah, definitely.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the other thing about COBOL is that most people would regard it as a living death to have to deal with it as a day job.
And I've had interactions with offshore COBOL shops. The ones I worked with were not at all good. You'll never get 99th-percentile coders to work in that language, unless their only motivation is money.
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.
COBOL code, like any code, was written to embody certain business processes, and also to work around the quirks and blind spots of COBOL. And the people who understood those business processes are likely to be dead by now, and any documentation they wrote might be current and correct, or it might not. And very few people under the age of 60 have ever used COBOL in anger. So any legacy replacement project is going to have to encompass a big reverse-engineering effort, including analysis of a code base nobody is familiar with.
I'm old. A friend of mine is a fair bit older, getting into his late 70s. He knows COBOL but his main area of expertise is OS services, database tuning and assembler on old IBM and Fujitsu iron. Those are critical to keeping those old systems running well. He works half-time, is booked over a year out, and has a jaw-dropping daily rate. He also has a rider: one provision is that they have to tell him where he can smoke on-site, and if the answer is "nowhere," the deal is off. Also, he won't schedule any work that conficts with Burning Man, and he looks like a homeless guy. I brought him in on a consulting gig once. He did his bit, including an amazingly effective presentation to the C-levels (despite his profoundly non-executive appearance), and went his merry way. Saved us a fortune. You need people like that in order to have even a remote chance of success, and they're becoming exceedingly rare. Musk and his kiddies don't even know what they don't know.
Yeah, Java can run maybe half as fast as equivalently complex C, while being far more maintainable. But to see that kind of performance, you'll want to use POJOs (plain old Java objects), not that enterprise bullshit. And there are many other optimization techniques that your average Java coder wouldn't see in their average coding job. I've been there, didn't like it. If I'm going to be dropping down to C for the hot spots, I'd rather use Python.
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.
Schedule-driven development by people with no domain knowledge, with poorly understood requirements and life-and-limb-critical outcomes, led by an unpredictable moron. What could go wrong?
I wouldn't assume that Java is only half as fast as C for every workload. It's probably a lot closer than you think in a lot of real world scenarios.
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.
Java can be fast at runtime, but optimization is most effective on frequently-run, repetitive sections of code.
The slow Java interpreter spin-up time was a big annoyance for use of Java in serverless cloud functions. Now the big cloud providers have ways to minimize that spin-up delay.
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.
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.
If it has to be JVM, then Kotlin. Java done properly.
I wish Java was declared deprecated back in 2017 when Kotlin was adopted for Android and supported by Spring. It was the only sensible way forward for JVM. Sure with containerization there's some debate for the necessity of JVM at all but its GC and runtime optimizations are nice.
Java has still an enormous adoption, though. It'd be very self harming making it deprecated. And I don't think containerization solves majority of cases, perhaps it does it better in backend. So both GC and Java are here with us like forever 🤷♂️
Anecdotally, Python is about three times as concise as Java. You have to write lots of boilerplate to do anything much more complex than Hello World in Java. And one of the oldest and most reproducible results in software engineering is that the defect rate is proportional to the number of lines of executable code. The more concise the language, the cheaper it is to maintain. This has been measured in hundreds of environments, with dozens of languages, over decades.
Python is slow, though, so there are some situations where it's not a good choice. But those cases are probably less numerous than you might assume. There have been a few occasions where I was told Python would be too slow, I've then built a proof-of-concept, and it was more than fast enough. People suck at knowing where bottlenecks are in complex systems.
And now that the Python project has finally bitten the bullet and taken measures to allow removal of the GIL, things might improve considerably, though Python's dynamic nature and some features of its type inference mean that some things it does will never be ultra-speedy.
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.
I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster
They're neither necessarily simpler nor faster.
COBOL is simple, but outside its sweet spot, it can't do much. That sweet spot is high volumes of relatively trivial calculations, coded by non-superstar coders. It's moderately efficient because it doesn't do all that much.
Of the oldest languages still in use, FORTRAN has gone through a few generations of incremental improvements, and for complex mathematical calculations, it can be faster than shit off a hot shovel. But again, it's limited in scope, its data typing is lousy, its general-purpose programming capabilities are poor, and any integration you do with other systems is going to be a vision of hell. I still deal with a FORTRAN codebase on my job, there are some situations where it's still one of the least-bad options.
Then, the last of the surviving languages of that vintage is Lisp. It can be insanely fast, but despite its simple syntax and semantics, nobody would call Lisp programming simple. Accounting-system coders would recoil in horror.
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.
well the new ruleset they will implement is quite simple:
IF user wants money AND user is rich THEN accept request ELSE fuck off
the tricky part is to say fuck off in a subtle enough way their maga shills think it's perfectly normal in order to save the nation blah blah blah
Not just domain logic. The implementation logic is often weird too. Cobol systems have crash/restart behaviour and other obscure semantics that often end up being used in anger; it's like using exceptions for control flow, but exceedingly obscure and unfortunately (from what I've seen of production cobol) a "common trick" in lots of real-world deployments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He's not dellusional, he just don't have a clue of whathe's talking about and just throw around keywords and try to look smart.
As longas you're not familiar with the subject it works well.
remember when he told programers to print some code they wrote previous weeks ? Or when he tried to impress people with his knowledge of PoE2 and Diablo 4 ? Qe has done the same for decades, at spacex and tesla as well.
It's a known fact that SpaceX have an entire eam of full time people whose job is listening to elon bullshit and being the yesmen so he feels validated, then actual engineers take decisions.
IIRC there were the same with tesla and for some reason the system stopped working. And then, the cybertruck happened.
I think his and Trump's roles are to be saboteurs.
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."
screams in quality assurance
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.
I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.
Nah B. This will be Extreme Agile XP with testing exclusively in Prod. Xitter will be the code repository.
Pair programming with Grok.
Spotty DOGE intern developer: "what's a for loop?"
Grok: "Look it up yourself, noob! Holy shit do I hate Elon Musk in every fucking way!"
I’d think they’d put the commits onto the blockchain.
What's "vibe programming"?
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):
The best commercial models did dumb stuff yesterday and I bet they'll still do dumb stuff tomorrow
Of course Leo has a fish in his PFP
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.
It's understanding code like chatgpt helps me understand Hungarian.
Bold of you to assume they'll use Java and not some obscure language picked based on the need to pad their resumes.
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.
In my shop, some of the managers were OK with teams using server-side node, with Mongo.
Those managers are now gone, and one of my jobs was to lifecycle that shit out. Just being near npm was enough to shorten my life by several years.
Mongo's actually a really nice choice for some use cases. It just wasn't good for what we were trying to use it for. Its replacement was Postgres, one DB for OLTP-like processing and another for OLAP. Works like a champ, and the improved analytics mean we've been able to tune the hell out of that sucker.
They're not going to use Java, it's going to be typescript.
Or Rust
You think those script kiddies know Rust?
No, but they want to seem cool
And they’ll use Grok to write the code anyway 😂
Rust is not a language I'd use for financial apps, but it's not a bad language. So I doubt that they'd use it. Musk is of a generation where he'd probably tell them to use PHP. Or if he listens to the twenty-something bros around him, maybe it'd be Dart, which is another decent language that's not well suited to the problem domain.
