Newly unemployed New Yorkers are being frustrated by 1970s-era technology | Hacker News Reader

Newly unemployed New Yorkers are being frustrated by 1970s-era technology

nytimes.com

290 pointsdankohn1205 comments

Maybe the only example I’ve seen of technology failing to keep up with proposed changes to the law/policy, usually it’s the other way around:

> New York, she added, also had a distinctly punitive approach when calculating benefits for part-time workers that withholds 25 percent of what they receive in a week for each day they work, no matter how many hours they put in. That means that if an unemployed actress spent just an hour or two a day three days a week delivering groceries for a service like Instacart, she would forfeit 75 percent of her weekly check.

> Legislation to change the rule appeared to have the support of Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders last year, she said, but no bill was ever signed into law. Mr. Blum said he was told why: The Labor Department’s primitive computers could not be reprogrammed quickly enough to make the adjustment.

So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.

> So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.

Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? It seems far more likely that someone was looking for an excuse and found one. (At the very least, the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology speaks to the general motivation not to invest money here, if not to any specific sneakiness around this case.)

I'd be inclined to invoke Hanlon's razor here.

And I'd be inclined to counter with Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

http://wikidumper.blogspot.com/2007/07/greys-law.html

I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs.

It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got.

The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.

Avoid ageist comments, please.

Well you pretty much have to be 50 to have had the same programming job for 25 years, it's not so much the age as the tenure. But I will take out the age.

I would still say it's pretty shitty to assume that "SV culture" is the only thing that innovates, or innovates quickly, which is what you're implying.

There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.

That's the culture. The SV innovation is that startups have gestalt views of things not a "management made it like this so I am unable to operate". The bureaucracy and the machinery that supports it is the government culture. People who don't understand this, often don't understand the natural offshoots that come from it: blameless post-mortems, prioritizing falsification, unlimited paid vacation, etc. These all work because the people participating have the culture.

The SV startup culture is a full-spectrum ownership thing. If your executive team isn't aiming at the right direction, you tell them that, and if you lose faith in the future as a result you go elsewhere. The executive team always relinquishes its power over you in order to maximize your effectiveness because that's the only thing that matters.

Government culture is different. It optimizes in a different constraint space. There has to be visibly equitable hiring, the needs of political expediency require things like "heads to roll", regression is more dangerous than lack of progression, etc. Because of this, government organizations operate differently. They're not inefficient. They're just optimizing to different constraints and they're incredible at doing so. I would hypothesize that you cannot retain SV startup culture at the government for any appreciable amount of time because of the constraint space - much of which is the result of natural law.

The age probably gives a misleading impression anyway, giving the idea that dynamic, change-the-world things are not done by 50 year olds.

But a widely cited statistic (don't know if it's true of course) is that the average age of a founder of a successful startup is 45.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

Even as an old, I'm not seeing that as ageist. The problem is not somebody with 25 years of experience. It's that they have settled into something comfortable and haven't kept up with 20 years worth of change.

Or underestimating the bureaucracy of the system. I did some work for a startup that interfaced with the government, and basically the government insists on doing everything in triplicate, getting approval from multiple layers of hierarchy, and does things on a yearly cadence.

I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.

Most large organizations are like this. At the megacorp I used to work for the running joke was that any change, no matter how small, to the legacy systems started at 1 year & 1 million dollars.

At work, our customers are the Oligarchist Cell Phone Companies (about three at this time). As I was joking with a higher up about adapting agile programming, it doesn't matter if we're on a two-week sprint when our customer is on a two-year sprint. And yes, it took over two years to get them to adapt a change.

This is not a very charitable view.

Keep in mind that at least in the Anglosphere, a point often raised about the government is that they are incompetent, that they need to be starved out, so usually

- they don't have the resources or backing to hire people who are up to date at competitive compensation levels

- the people left are those who have been able to survive such onslaught from their bosses, so they are presumably very jaded, cynical, and careful about new proposals

Our politicians do not empower the bureaucracy to be nimble, there is no reward for doing so. So I wouldn't expect it to be.

The incentives for government consultants are also generally not aligned to deliver quickly or competently.

There seems no way to win with government, unfortunately. If you de-fund it, you get cost cutting, reduced workforce, reduced capability, corruption, and disfunction. If you fully fund it, you get inflated costs, a bloated workforce, inefficiency, waste, grift, and more disfunction. No matter how you fund it, you get disfunction at the end of the day.

You classify it as strategic readiness and have something like a Core of Engineers do the work.

Really the US military forces need an additional branch, the Civilian Core of Engineers. They would be held to high ethical standards (on the job), and all work they do for the government would become public domain. I imagine this could be combined with a New New Deal where public-works projects are generally funded, as well as a job guarantee / internship place to build a resume and gain social connections through.

As a minor nitpick, the word is "Corps".

I actually did mean Core as inspired by the Corps*. The distinction being that this group of individuals would be more like a not-for-profit company than the military, and thus, they aren't a Corps.

"In many armies, a corps is a battlefield formation composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corps

High ethical standards and the US Military do not go hand-in-hand.

This seems rather myopic.

Singapore is, by a lot of accounts, a well-functioning government with competent bureaucrats.

It's also a dictatorship.

Maybe more funding to increasing salaries for government employees would be a good start instead of more funding in order to hire more people/bloat the system. I think it could over time make government agency work more attractive and prestigious and in turn attract the best talent.

Maybe government shouldn’t exist in steady state?

It’s possible that people don’t have the ability to be consistent and you have to tack between the two strategies.

The way to win is to refactor and reorganize properly. Unfortunately that is a difficult task in both management and politics as every special interest involved with the power to change is selfish towards their own goals. How democratic vs dictatorial only changes how the interests are distributed.

Look into the Judicial Council of California’s case management boondoggle. A few billion was spent with nothing to show for it. I’m pretty sure every “there isn’t enough funding” argument can be countered with real examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

It's possible for both things to be true.

Money doesn't magically fix management issues caused by a lack of money; people who are not used to spending money may not know how to spend it well once they get it. Lottery winners generally fizzle out their winnings after a few years.

This is also a problem if you spend billions on consultants rather than shoring up the civil service; consultants aren't incentivized properly to deliver a good system on time.

There's nothing about perl that makes it hard to change a mathematical formula for benefits.

Not are any "new skills" needed. Just funding to do the work.

Is it actually Perl though? I have my money on COBOL which is an entirely different story.

Perl? If only. We're talking COBOL here.

>the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology //

Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies. That means until the legislation is updated (and after!) government departments might need to support "primitive technology".

Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible. That makes it hard to adopt new tech, and harder to dispose of old tech.

The only need for a fax machine I've had in recent times (in UK) is by proxy, a pharmacy needed a fax from my nephew's doctor in order to issue an emergency inhaler. Of course billions has been spent inter alia on replacing fax, through having integrated, networked medical systems in the UK but the IT companies involved have been "unable" to provide working systems. £20bn in ~2007, £12bn in ~2013 - I don't think we have a working national records system yet?

Companies who can make £100s of millions without delivering a working product wish to continue being paid, the money stops when they deliver the project ...

> Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies.

> Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible.

Isn't that a good thing? You probably don't need the latest whizbang tech stack and UI framework that needs a screaming CPU, tons of memory, and a 4G connection to implement a usable government service website.

You do need a good design process at both the UX and data processing level, focused on clarity and simplicity, with lots of unit and integration tests.

Yes, I'd agree slow progress with near universal access is good; I was being descriptive. But it still needs to utilise the best of established technology.

It seems like you're making the parent point for him/her. Yes, governments should support 100% access. Requiring a fax machine for anything, as in this case, goes against that. (Great that the UK doesn't force this on people though!)

Edit: one line I like to use when asked to fax something is, "Oh, sure thing, I know there's a museum right nearby!"

As I understand the requirement is not that fax is essential to the service, but there is a class of people you may shut out when you turn off the ability to fax.

It's why I'm very skeptical of anything cashless or requiring a smartphone, because there is, for the foreseeable future, going to be a population that can't participate in a cashless, smartphone society.

There is also a decent part that can only participate by smartphone though.

The answer is to accommodate both, not to shut out one or the other. That's what 100% access is.

Only want to participate by smartphone. I guess smartphone payers can handle cash, but people that can have credit cards can't pay via a phone?

> Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology?

Have no clue about the political will here, but the outdated failed technology story sounds very believable to me!

To be sure, I don't doubt that the technology failed. I meant only that it was surely not a case of political will to action being stymied by failing technology, but rather something between political inertia and will to inaction meeting happily with the failing technology which was, after all, its bequest.

Generally, I think it's very much both. People's expectations for what's possible is based on experience. And that experience is driven by by previous expectations.

I've helped some places shift to a much faster delivery cadence. That's really easy to do if you have a clean slate. E.g., when I co-founded something in 2010, we started with a weekly delivery cadence and the turned up up, so that a team of 6 was shipping 2-3 times per day. Our infrastructure and our code was very much tuned for that. It took some work to get to that level, especially in terms of automating absolutely everything, but once we'd done the work it was fine. In fact, it was great!

In contrast, I've tried to get existing companies just up to a weekly cadence. That's an incredible slog because expectations, tools, and processes are all built around much slower cadences. It's not like anybody was bad. It was just that if you were only doing something quarterly or annually, it made no sense to automate it. Or even understand it, really. There was a lot of the business version of, "Honey, where did we put the Christmas lights? Did we replace the wonky tree stand, or did we just talk about it?" It's a nightmare. And the whole time most people are like, "Why are we bothering to go faster? The old approach worked!" And for them, it did work.

For a lot of government stuff, I think the change cadence co-evolves. Law is pretty stable, so people just build with low change frequency in mind. A decade later a change comes along and it's really hard, so the higher-ups learn to minimize change. That makes things even worse; requests are now met with high budgets and long lead times, meaning legislators learn not to propose small improvements. That legal stability biases the tech staff and processes even more to not touching anything.

And of course, so much of this stuff was built long before we figured out how to maintain quality in the face of frequent change. Two decades in, there are a ton of new companies that still can't do CI/CD and automated testing well. It's no shock code from the 1970s hasn't caught up.

What's the betting that the alteration needed is to change 0.25 to 0.025, say, and then record hours worked instead of days ... ?

But, hey they might end up paying someone more than a pittance, and that would never do, eh.

The issue is not "why don't they upgrade the system" but the issue is "does it do what is required of it by those who sign the cheques"?

Sadly, being a "hostile environment" for claiming benefit is exactly what large numbers of welfare systems the world over are designed to do.

It has taken a decade for America's Underclass to claw its way back to parity - given how many more people are affected this time round, I doubt any country, even US can afford to stall so many of its citizens for so long again.

We can mail everyone a cheque. That might be the simplest solution all round.

Mailing everyone a check at the scale of the US population is also a technology problem. I don't expect it to go very well -- it will happen slowly, a lot of people entitled to checks won't get them, checks will be sent to the wrong places, etc.

Deposit $1000 into every account electronically

What about the people without bank accounts?

I have 3 bank accounts. Do I get $3000? What if one of them is a joint account with another person?

It's not that simple.

This part I actually don't think is that complicated. Only one of those bank accounts paid a tax liability or received a tax refund last year. The same one will receive this direct deposit.

Isn't this exactly how they're doing it? They're only mailing out checks to people who didn't use direct deposit for their taxes.

How would that be done if the individual hasn't provided direct deposit information?

Agreed, but still radically simpler than the convoluted means testing that we do now. If welfare critics care about the efficiency of the public dollar, this seems like a simple measure to get more benefit at lower cost.

Mailing address should be a part of the intake process and matched with the mandatory census that is done periodically. Seems like this could smooth out a lot of edge cases

One of the great mysteries of government solved itself in front of my eyes as soon as I did a hackathon sponsored by a local city. Even simple relationships like matching a person to their address, not only were difficult to access, but literally did not exist (even if they did exist, city officials told us that some people change addresses so quickly we can't count on the data to be accurate). Same goes with similar data points like phone numbers.

It's interesting, because this data obviously exists somewhere - with the NSA, cellphone/utility providers, hell, Facebook probably has it - but accessing that as a city official involves a lot of phone calls, warrants, etc.

So even things as simple as "send each person a check" are impossible to automate because the data does not exist - and arguably for a lot of people, should not exist in govt hands.

The most obvious example of this right now is Florida, where the current unemployment aid system was intentionally designed to make it difficult to maintain benefits and to make it easier to count firings as 'for cause', to reduce the official state unemployment statistics.

You can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone. Some apps offer this for $$$, but it's possible to get it all done for free using websites (take pic -> convert to pdf online -> fax with faxzero.com). Some paid apps even mimic a scanned copy by having you take multiple shots and reconstructing what the paper looks like into PDF automatically.

The government will always be slower to respond to change, so it's sad to hear a story like this. However the author had an excellent opportunity to educate its readers, but instead focused on the fear factor ("...he had to go to a Staples store in the middle of a pandemic...") - no, he didn't have to do that. Pretending the only way to send a fax involves finding a fax machine is disingenuous.

To be fair, the majority of people can barely resize an image, let alone take a good quality clear photo, convert it to pdf, and then have the knowledge of online fax being possible.

With respect to all the elders for whom all of this computer technology stuff came up pretty late in their lifetime - when and where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?

I doubt there any estimates on the number of people who can fax a PDF from a phone. But I'd be surprised if it was much higher than 25%.

Most people here could probably work it out eventually, but most people are not the general population.

81% of people own a smart phone, so that's not a good start.

maybe someone will come along and explain why this is insensitive, but I think if a person has access to a computer (which is not a given) and a naive search query returns (relatively short/simple) step-by-step instructions on the first page of results, it's not unreasonable to expect the person to be able to do that thing.

Have you seen people doing basic internet searches? Open "the internet" by clicking the 'e' button, search Bing for Google, go to Google, type in the web address of an email someone sent you that you printed out ... I'm not even kidding.

But yes, most people can send an image on Facebook (with some coaching), so they can learn to send an image to a fax service.

What often confused these things is that people will type "send a fax" on Google, and then install the first thing recommended - those recommendations are based on 'making most profit for $company & Google' and so are often not the best system and often charge a lot c for basic services (with all the usual dark patterns).

yes, I often have to watch my father do these things. sometimes I can't handle the frustration and give step-by-step instructions, but I try to act like a TA and have him come up with the next step. usually he can figure it out himself if given enough time, he just doesn't really believe he can.

The internet is full of criminals. It's a reasonable way to expect people to find tools to access government services.

where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?

I think the question is why should there be a line about basic computer competency?

Why can't many methods be available to people, instead of restricting ourselves to certain methods?

Not everyone went to college. Heck, not everyone goes to high school. Those are very often the people who need government and medical services the most.

When computing interfaces stop being, generally, awful and arcane and requiring learning all kinds of voodoo rituals and tea-leaf reading to use (which becomes knowledge of how the systems are put together if you go into programming, of course—"oh that button's probably disappearing then re-appearing when you click it because [implementation detail]")

I'm a pretty cynical guy but in this case I disagree, the vast majority of UIs are simple enough that you just don't notice them working. Having tried occasionally to bake a UI myself, We take good UI for granted.

Yeah there's a learning curve but by and large even across operating system there are consistencies and even technically illiterate users can get up to speed quickly.

Everyone on this board lives in a tech bubble.

Do you remember the first time you discovered you could swipe in from the right in windows, or down from the top in android to access hidden functionality? Or the magic swipe to go back in the browser? Have you tried accessing the internet from small rural town USA? If you leave the coasts there are places you can't get cell service, much less blazing fast cell based internet from a rural provider. Those coverage maps the providers show in their advertisements are huge lies. Modern web UI's don't tend to run great on HugesNet, or single bar 3G.

That is just the tip, UI's have majorly regressed from the time period of the original iphone. Go to the local senior citizens home and give a bunch of them modern android/iphones and see how many can figure out how to add a contact, or send an email. Worse companies like consumer cellular have a section for flip phones. Not that it is really bad. My mother has one and likes it more than any smart phone, but its limits her.

Before you criticise computers or the internet as an access path to government, remember that bar it needs to beat is the DMV/MVA office, which is uniformly awful across this country.

This is a good point. We take a lot of skills for granted that required to successfully use a DMV/MVA office. If the truly compare the processes, which is actually worse?

We will probably have a better idea of where that line might be when the number of Americans who don't use the internet isn't measured in the millions. That number is about 25 million adults now.

https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/FT_19...

I would bet cash money that a substantial fraction of people who claim they "don't use the Internet" actually do but don't know they are using "the Internet".

Also, many of the people who don't use the internet also don't have access to fax machines or mailbox service either (homeless, very rural), so they aren't harmed by internet replacement for those.

I’m not sure about that. The 65+ demographic is huge and very over represented in the survey.

From the full pew survey, the strongest correlations were education and age... and only 19% of those who didn’t have the internet said it was because they couldn’t afford it.

Given that the demographics of people who don’t have the internet overlap very significantly with those who need benefits the most, I can’t help but think that moving public services to online-only might be a bit of an out-of-touch solution.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/22/some-americ...

your concern about accessibility is valid, but this strikes me as an exaggeration. my seventy year old father never progressed past "hunt-and-peck" and continues to try to poke my laptop display as if it were an ipad, but he can damn sure figure out how to scan an important document to pdf. if you even enter a clueless search query like "how do I send fax", most of the top hits are about sending faxes with a computer.

my seventy old father

So your anecdada cancels out his anecdata?

I work in healthcare, occasionally customer-facing. Your dad is the exception.

Touch typing is not an essential tech skill.

Your laptop missing modern features isn't a problem with your father's skills.

That goes to OPs point. Rather than writing a narrative based on fear, there’s another version of the story that is: Here’s how to scan to PDF from your Android/iOS/Windows laptop. Here’s a YouTube video you can follow along with. Here’s 8 freeware applications that will help you crop it. These 5 services will allow you to fax without having to go to Staples.

There are still people who that won’t help, but positive mental attitude goes a long way.

This seems missing the point of what percentage of the US population is lacking the basic digital literacy to be able to remotely approach some of the tasks above.

Being a consumer is far different than being a creator/manipulator of content.

We do it natively in our day so much we forget that there are many that don't participate in the world like this. They probably would, if they had the chance to learn.

Which baffles me even on things like craigslist. How the hell can people not provide pictures? In 2008? Sure I can understand not everybody had a portable camera because why? But 2020? Absolutely not. It's frankly unacceptable that anybody uses that excuse anymore. I always laugh when I see aparatments for rent...but no photos. There is no way I'd want to have a landlord who can't take like 3 photos to even advertise their product. They'll probably even require me to send them an f'ing paper check too.

<i> They'll probably even require me to send them an f'ing paper check too. </i>

I've been temporary renting my old house, and I don't take credit cards, nor am I setting up a custom merchant/billing/etc system for one renter. Mostly because all the easy solutions eat a percentage of the transaction.

So, outside of the initial cashiers check for the security/etc depost, I've been willing to take direct depost, or any other electronic form of payment that can deposit money into a checking account I've setup.

Funny thing is, all of my renters so far have ended up sending paper checks. Including the first one who also happened to be a pretty serious software engineer. That is despite the fact that there are a dozen billpay/etc services and various electronic transfer/etc services in existence. Overwhelmingly they are ripoffs, and the few run by honest banks in a number of cases actually send paper checks if the bill isn't for a major credit card company.

Try it. Can your bank send a thousand dollar plus amount to a random 3rd party bank/account for free (or a trivial fee?). I doubt it. For whatever reason setting up a funds transfer between two arbitrary checking accounts is more difficult than it should be.

Honestly I would not have thought to look for a phone app that does faxes and hell, twenty years ago I ran a system auto-sending faxes and tried to build a start up on it.

Yeah Inthink going to Staples was reasonable.

Hmm I guess 15 years ago eFax was actually a thing because it saved people from having to buy fax machines, and you didn't need to be home to receive/send them. I feel like most people around me who used faxes in any capacity knew about it.

You can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone.

For work a couple of weeks ago I looked up the Census figures for connectivity in the areas that my company serves.

15% of the population don't have ANY internet devices. Not at home, at work, on a computer, a tablet, or even on a phone of any type.

It was something like 25% of the people in our service area don't have an internet connection at home. Not cable, DSL, fixed microwave, or even cellular.

Based on that, I suspect a lot of poor people only get to use the internet at work. The web logs for the sites I maintain seem to confirm this. When the libraries and businesses closed, thousands of users simply disappeared.

Once you involve random services, you’d be as well served just emailing the pictures.

Why would you trust a free PDF conversion or fax service.

"Convert to PDF online' is rife with privacy and confidentiality issues, especially regarding this kind of information.

I have used such sites to convert say, a PDF data table to an Excel file. I would never use it for anything involving business or personal information.

Same thing happened to a relative on mine two weeks ago when she tried to apply for unemployment.

The state web site wanted additional documentation, and because the walk-in offices are closed, the only allowed method of delivering the documents was by fax.

I signed up for an e-fax service and sent the paperwork for her. She also mailed a copy just in case, though that wasn't listed as an approved method of sending in paperwork.

While I think the state should be able to accept paperwork uploaded to its web site, I understand them not wanting to do that. With the way we've seen unemployment insurance web sites overloaded to the point of crashing across the country, uploading is no longer as reliable as fax. Some would say it never was.

E-mail is a worse solution, IMO. I say this based on the number of misdirected e-mails I receive in my commercial mailboxes from people who mistake one of the web sites I run for all kind of businesses from Boeing to hospitals. Millions of people think nothing of putting all of their personal, exploitable information in an e-mail to a stranger.

I work in the healthcare space, and the social media guy says that people are forever sending him very personal health information through Facebook, Twitter, and other insecure methods. Or worse — when he posts something about a particular condition, hundreds of people will post photos of themselves asking if he thinks they have it, too.

Fax isn't perfect. But it is far better than what Silicon Valley has given us to date.

Good point. The failure is that there is no open, interoperable way to transfer files.

Http POST isn't interoperable and open?

Try sending an HTTP POST to someone's phone.

Sure. I’ll HTTP POST you a picture of the kids.

There are a dozen (some that don't even need public addresses for the end user) but we've abandoned or made difficult many of them because they're difficult to monetize.

Every email or web server problem is also a fax problem.

Posted this on twitter, and will re-offer here. At my company , we have had to build an e-fax platform due to faxing still being used heavily in the medical space. If anyone needs to fax documents for unemployment, DM me on twitter or email me (email in HN profile) and I'll set you up so that you can fax for free.

Twitter link is https://twitter.com/klinskyc/status/1246465251614363650

This site lets you send faxes for free as another option: https://faxzero.com/

I'm curious about what your e-fax platform is. I've integrated our platform with 2 e-fax providers and I'm not happy with either of them.

Hi,

We're nor particularly happy with our API partner either, so would be happy to share experiences. Can you email me at cavan at gethealthie dot com ?

This is an example of administrative burden. In this case, it's due to bureaucratic incompetence, but it is often an intentional policy lever to limit access to benefits:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/28/upshot/admini...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid-enrollmen...

Exactly, and it’s not just in one state. Florida’s website was apparently designed to keep the reported unemployment rate low, by making it difficult or impossible to file.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-unemployment-website_...

And just as often, I'd add that it's more about systemic factors. Let me quickly tell the story of GetCalFresh: https://www.getcalfresh.org/

This was built by some friends of mine, my former colleagues at Code for America. Their basic notion was that applying for CalFresh (our version of food stamps) was too hard. So they applied classic Lean Startup techniques to solve the problem. They ran Google ads and directed assistance seekers to a simple Typeform that had barely enough information for the best case, and figured out how to get people benefits Then they iterated rapidly. You can read more of their story in this two-part article: https://leanstartup.co/part-1-from-root-hypothesis-to-functi... https://leanstartup.co/part-2-from-prototype-to-real-transac...

From the stories I've heard from them over the years, the real problem was neither incompetence nor malice. It's that doing anything involving a lot of different people is really hard. The counties actually had online application for years. But those systems were built by large government contractors, and they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec. Like so much enterprise software, user experience just ended up being a low priority. There are lots of causes for that, but it's not like any single person is to blame. Everybody's just responding to their local incentives, trying to get by.

Happily, a lot of the people in government I've met truly believe in public service. For me the moral of GetCalFresh is that almost everybody involved wanted things to be better. The trick is showing them how to make that happen in the context of the system they're in.

> But those systems were built by large government contractors, and they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec.

Gets me to thinking about 'large enterprise' stuff in general. In the situations I've been on large enterprise projects, most of them were just modifying existing processes ('streamlining', etc), but there was no huge payoff at the end. In most cases, whether the end users could use the system at all, or 10% faster, or 50% faster, no one's job was going to be significantly changed. The 'enterprise' as a whole wouldn't change all that much.

I worked on a different system - years ago - creating a web-based ordering system. Previously, the company had orders faxed or mailed in, then keyed in to a system. This process took 2-3 weeks per month to get all the orders 'in'. We put up a web system, and they had all their orders in, in electronic format, in 18 hours, with no need to bring in temp workers to key in orders. That was transformative, but... even though the new system is vital, there's not much more that can be done with it - reducing 18 hours down to, say, 9 hours, won't have any effect on the company's operations. Going from 3 weeks to 1 day was transformative - they could make different supply chain decisions, better scheduling for materials/staff/etc.

At some point, many 'enterprise' system changes may not deliver transformative benefits, just incremental, and it may be harder to get anyone to care about incremental changes.

I get that for sure. But one of the lessons I take away from Toyota's history is that continuous improvement can make a big difference if it's tackled systemically.

There's a graph in one of Mike Rother's books, probably Toyota Kata that shows per-worker productivity of major automotive manufacturers. Toyota started behind; they were catching up from Japan's decimation in WWII. the US Big 3 eventually leveled off. Toyota caught up and then just kept going, allowing them to produce much better cars for much less.

At some point a US automaker in trying to understand it ordered parts from a Japanese supplier. When they received the parts, they did their standard QA checks, measuring part size and variance. Except they couldn't measure the variance, because their instruments weren't precise enough. That high precision allowed downstream improvements: higher quality, lower cost.

So sure, the local optimization of order entry from 3 weeks to 1 day removed a bottleneck, improving the whole flow of the system. But it's not like the system had no bottlenecks. As always, the bottleneck just goes somewhere else. And even when a given process isn't the bottleneck, removing waste is always beneficial. The problem isn't that the change isn't worthwhile. It's that a company's threshold for "significant" is too high.

> removing waste is always beneficial. The problem isn't that the change isn't worthwhile. It's that a company's threshold for "significant" is too high

I don't disagree in theory. But convincing someone to spend time money on something with a low ROI is usually a challenge. A bunch of low ROI projects, coordinated over time, can provide a larger ROI when viewed strategically, but you have to have the right people in place to take that view.

Definitely! And I think that's often symptomatic of other organizational issues. E.g., A lot of American business culture focuses on local incentives and optimizations. If a manager is being evaluated and paid based on metrics A, B, and C, how much can we expect them to ignore that and solve systemic problems?

The standard MBA solution to this is that higher-level managers must design ever more elaborate systems to correctly measure the right behaviors. But a) that's somewhere between hard and impossible, b) the people filling those positions are only human, and c) the average CEO tenure is ~5 years, and executive tenure in a given position is even lower, so there's not a lot of incentive for anybody to create a system optimized for long-term value.

Is there a list anywhere of bureaucratic processes like this that could use a more streamlined tool built on top of them?

This type of project seems like a much more impactful use of developer side project time than almost anything else.

I don't think building the tool is the real problem. I think it's figuring out which tool to build. And creating strong enough relationships that somebody on the inside will work with you long enough to iterate your way to enough success that you all can prove the value in what you're doing.

> they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec

Did the gov contractors do things like ensure the site was accessible? Because those laws exist for a reason, and the official government website SHOULD be held to comply with them. Sometimes this is detrimental to how slick a site looks.

While your friends site has much less of an obligation to comply with this kind of requirement, a quick check shows that something as simple as contrast is not good enough for vision impaired users https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.getcalfresh.org

This ideas that > user experience just ended up being a low priority may be better stated as > user experience for people like me just ended up being a low priority

Perhaps the needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few?

The convenience of the many outweighs the needs of the few.

There is little need of any sort of trade off as simple enough sites are trivial to make accessible.

No. One, the needs often aren't in conflict. Building an accessible website doesn't hurt people who don't need it. Two, government is there to serve everybody, and in practice a lot of the people it serves directly are the ones already neglected by commerce, so it needs to be especially good at not just ignoring "the few".

I think that this is the exact opposite of the point of government programs. We try to build these programs in such a way that they avoid the tyranny of the majority. Especially when you consider that those who need accessible interfaces are more likely to need government assistance in other parts of their lives.

Not for The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

Thanks for pointing it out! I don't know anybody working on it any more, but I encourage you to contact GCF and let them know.

You're welcome to evaluate the government contractor sites yourself. You can start here, but the tool varies by county: http://www.benefitscal.com/

Picking the first one, I see more errors: https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://www.mybenefitscalwin...

And I should add that technical compliance with standards is one thing, and actual usability for people with disabilities is another. Given that the contractor-built application tools were hard for everybody to use, I would be surprised to learn that they were notably better for people with disabilities.

The specifics aside, I think you make a great point. Governments are mandated to serve everybody, while startups are mostly interested in people they can easily profit from serving. So startup-world techniques need to be applied differently in government contexts."Up and to the right" isn't enough.

I feel compelled to step in here and hopefully provide some insight on what that report means, because it doesn't appear to be what you implied.

* Edit: The header image failed to load for me and complicates much of what I said in the following paragraph; it isn't as cut and dry as it first appeared.

First off, that automated WAVE report is stellar for GetCalFresh. The color contrast here is an excellent example of strict conformance to WCAG 2.0 AA contrast requirements. (Most of the site is hitting AAA contrast requirements, which is above and beyond.) The report identifies a issue for an image element's contrast in the footer. Please note that this is a false positive; the actual visual contrast meets the requirement.

Heading levels are always a bit of a mess as projects get larger, but as the linked report shows, they could easily be improved slightly in this case. That's not going to outright break the site or render it inaccessible; however, it is a slightly less navigable experience for a user.

Finally, it's important to look at both the spirit and practice of conformance to accessibility standards. In spirit, these are usability standards. You can build something that checks all the automatically enforceable, auditable boxes in the standards, but is unusable in practice. Or you can focus on delivering a strong experience to users, focusing on the POUR principles, and I'd argue that's what an accessible experience should look like (not to exclude ensuring the more baseline elements of conformance, of course).

Thanks for clarifying! I am not an accessibility expert so sounds like I misread the report :D

What GCF did is commendable, and I am happy to hear that they did well on the accessibility side. At the same time my goal was less to point out an issue with GCF, but rather to point out that government websites may not feel as slick as we're used to for a variety of reasons that a quick look may not reveal.

Clear summary. As a security pro, I've stopped developing products and solutions aimed at enterprises because I'm just no longer interested in helping them. A product "aimed," at anyone is going to fail anyway, but what clicked was building something to enable somebody's bureaucracy workflow isn't improving lives, and any product that sidesteps, replaces, or breaks bureaucracy is going to find itself isolated by it. Bureaucracy isn't a problem to be solved, it's just their way of life.

Next project is going to help individual people, and not organizations.

I have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government. In Sweden, for example, there is a system named BankID that is used to access your bank account or pay your taxes.

The last time I used a fax was one connected to a Windows 2000 server in a small company. So, I will use a scanner and use the shares fax printer. Thanks is almost 20 years ago.

I am surprised how low tech the USA is. I would have expected something like that in a small countryside town, but never in a major city.

What's the reason for such a sad state of technology? I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.

Fax is often used in healthcare. As bad as it is, it has the advantage of being universal - there is no vendor lock in. When the alternative is lots of separate systems with their own incompatible file formats and terrible user experience, faxing a document (which produces a paper copy on the other side) might be the easiest way.

I wish there was a universal paper to OCR protocol.

Email is also universal. The difference is that fax has a legal exception carved out for it that permits HIPAA-compliant systems to consider fax as secure while email is considered insecure and thus non-compliant.

Of course fax is horrendously insecure. But the legal exception stands, and when your security posture is dictated by regulatory compliance and not by results, then it's the best solution.

That is technically correct, but it does not answer the actual question. Why is there such exception? Why is nothing changing?

Email isn't universal when it comes to HIPPA.

There's a hundred different companies offering ways to exchange encrypted emails to the medical market, and they're all pretty bad.

This legal extension is valid also in finance, I was doing production support of a fax digitising service in a financial institution around 8 years ago. AFAIK it's still there, creating a fake alert about one of the 8 lines down every week.

I think this is true. The only time I fax, is annually, to renew my insurance. The 'binding letter' requires a physical signature, and they reject a 'digital signature'. Yet, a fax is digitial. All righty then.

I can only chalk it up to a combination of misaligned incentives, cost cutting, and legacy technology. These vary with locality but wear the same veneer. Some aspects are surprisingly seamless. Some are seamless but hidden behind unnecessary complexity. Some are just downright archaic. It's like a tired beast that exists because its heart won't quit.

> What's the reason for such a sad state of technology?

I think being pioneers is one factor, so they are first to adopt some technologies and then there are procedures and backwards compatibility to maintain. For instance, a while ago I learned that charging using the raised numbers in credit cards can be done still in some places in the US. In my country credit cards arrived much later, skipping that phase, and so we didn't have technical/procedural debt when transitioning to NFC credit card reading/mobile apps.

Similar things happen in many other fields, I think it is one of the hidden costs of being first adopters. For instance banks and airliners where pioneers in the use of IT, and now many are stuck with obsolete mainframes, languages and GUIs. The grocery shop around the corner adopted IT just a few years ago, and they have a shiny, modern tactile system instead of a green phosphor GUI done in COBOL.

>For instance, a while ago I learned that charging using the raised numbers in credit cards can be done still in some places in the US. In my country credit cards arrived much later, skipping that phase, and so we didn't have technical/procedural debt when transitioning to NFC credit card reading/mobile apps.

What technical debt? Having to put raised lettering on credit cards?

I don't remember the details since it was a while ago but apparently for instance they couldn't have virtual/multiple accounts in one physical card because raised numbers for the account were desired, in line with: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/03/embossed_credit_car...

>they couldn't have virtual/multiple accounts in one physical card

why would you want that?

The idea was, IIRC, that the card would be writable through NFC or BT so you could select which account you preferred without carrying several cards in your wallet.

> I am surprised how low tech the USA is.

In the U.S., many important official dealings (e.g. IRS, DMV) are still done over snail mail, and certain payments still require mailed checks. Coupled with the absurd amount of marketing spam received over snail mail (think 1 out of 100 pieces of mail is legit), it’s a terrible bore having to sift through mail regularly, and very easy to accidentally throw away important mail. The inconvenience of having to use fax for a vanishingly small number of tasks pales in comparison.

s/are still done/can be done/

I don’t think I’ve mailed an IRS return this century. My DMV allows me to renew registration and print temporary plates from their website. They even send me an iCal file to remind me of my next renewal date.

I didn’t say all IRS/DMV businesses are conducted via snail mail. Some are. E.g. ever been audited? Also 1040NR couldn’t be e-filed at least a couple years back. As for DMV, this obviously varies by state (and again, the nature of the business).

I'm in the middle of this right now. I need a copy of my W-2 transcripts from previous years, the IRS is backed up for the "official" interface to do that, so they want me to pull my own papers manually.

To do that online, you need to create an account. They want SMS verification, but refuse to allow pay-by-the-month plans, so you need to have a postcard physically sent out with a verification code.

(incidentally, the "password complexity verification" was broken on Firefox, even with ublock completely disabled. It required a special character but would never accept that I actually had put one. Also, when I cancelled out and tried it on a different browser it locked me out for 24 hours.)

I just did a "request a copy by mail", that will probably show up sooner than the postcard given that it took another 24 hours to clear the lock and create an account on Safari to get the postcard sent out.

Mostly politics. During the 90s and early 2000s there were initiatives to build national IDs tied to biometrics. The initial response from the reactionary element was that it was the mark of the beast, etc. it would also make it harder to exploit undocumented labor.

In the 2010s, that shifted with demographics and those folks saw ID as a tool suppress voter turnout and advance the immigration policies.

> I have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government.

I really wish we had something like that in the US... I actually have a scanned image of my signature that I use to "sign" documents digitally. Feels ridiculous, but it works, and prevents me from having to print out / scan in documents.

Our nation is pretty much run by and for older Americans who don't like change and don't value technology.

> I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.

How do you convince a manager twice your age that you know more about tech than them and can get it to work in their favor but their so scared of technology that they still force you to do all your work in paper?

That is the workforce in the US right now. It's old people in management that are too scared to learn tech and don't trust younger people who do know how to make things efficient.

One weird thing that I often see is that "technological progress" indexes by various agencies (Facebook's comes to mind as the first one) gives the US a good position. Yet we hear these horror stories. There seems to be a massive dissonance between different areas and professions in the US.

Can anyone confirm or correct me and explain why these indexes are like that?

"Ms. Steffens said that Connecticut has had to resort to recruiting retirees who knew how to program in COBOL, a nearly extinct computer language."

I work at fortune 25. We are training college grad COBOL. It may be endangered but it won't be extinct for decades.

Do you find it hard to attract college grads to do that?

No because we don't tell them when recruiting. Lol. It's because we only need small percentage to know it and they get to work on other stacks.

We have a college grad who volunteered for one of our COBOL/assembler teams. The kind of alpha nerd who runs his own reverse engineered WoW server, that kind of thing. So it might seem surprising that he's want to be buried in COBOL-land, but his rationale was pretty simple: he wanted to come to work, build things, and go home without being on a treadmill of learning new crap all the time.

That was a decade ago. He comes to work, he churns out business functions, he goes home and fiddles with whatever amuses him. Meanwhile the grads in the same era who came into .NET or Java teams have gone through how many patterns and frameworks? .NET to .NET Core + .NET to all .NET Core, WPF, UWP, whatever the new hotness is? J2EE, SpringBoot, microservices, JSF, React, React Native, etc.

I find it hard to think he did the wrong thing, really.

I'm idly wondering how today's "modern" Java* micro-service buzzword driven setups will look to someone who has to maintain it 40+ years later.

Maybe COBOL and mainframe wasn't that bad after all.

At the very least they won’t require the physical presence of a mainframe and that’s something.

An as/400 can be about the size of a normal desktop case.

I don't think that's the point. Whether the machine is small or big, the physical presence is the pain point

will our clouds be running in 30-40 years? will they expose the same APIs?. There is a hidden pro that there will be a maximum "unnattended" lifetime to a lot of todays software.

No, instead you depend on AWS to not change their API for 40 years. I'm not sure it's an improvement.

They will require different cloud providers to still provide the same interfaces. Good luck with that. You also need different package repositories to still work. I think a mainframe is a safer bet.

The upside is that having to tweak things every 5 years (say) will probably make it less likely that things will just work for decades, until they collapse in a screaming heap.

It feels to me that a system that doesn't tolerate massive technical debt is a better system.

I think the same phenomena exists with Linux and dynamic linking. Linux is incredibly less crufty than Windows because userspace compatibility isn't so long-lasting, APIs can be deprecated, garbage removed.

Mainframes are now often running as VMs these days.

I think this depends on how it is maintained over time. If there are a collection of Java microservices maintained by dedicated team. And over time they upgrade from JDK 11 to JDK 13. Add features, fix bugs. Rewrite some services in Go. Then rewrite some in whatever the hot language is after Go. Then port to ARM. Then migrate from AWS to the next thing. And so on. If that is what they do, I think they will be fine. A dedicated team, constantly maintaining and evolving the system.

On the other hand, if they write the Java microservices now, running on JDK 11, on Intel x86-64, and then never touch it for 40 years. That will be like some COBOL+mainframe setup that no one knows how to fix, change, upgrade, redeploy, etc.

The tech companies using microservices generally have teams that constantly evolve their products, and over time they end up completely replacing services with new services, underlying infrastructure with new infrastructure, and so on. They will be fine with their Java microservices.

Governments that fund a project once and never touch it again, their technology will always be hard to maintain in 20+ years.

Actually, what you describe is a bigger problem than simply static maintenance. Overwhelmingly what happens is that, that "rewrite some services in go" and run them on AWS frequently means that the project is never 100% rewritten in go on AWS because some part gets moved to GCE or whatever in a couple years, and then someone else takes over with different priorities, and they never finish your go/aws migration, etc, etc, etc. In 40 years your project is now written in a dozen different scripting languages, running on a Rube Goldberg number of different platforms.

I've worked with people migrating off these machines, and yes they are everywhere in any business/goverment older than 20 years. Companies/Government orgs to this day have hpux/solaris/aix/zos/ztpf/nonstop/iseries/vms/NT/etc systems all over their critical infrastructure because those were the great/new technology at some point.

For whatever reason, overwhelmingly the rewrites turn out to be much more difficult than originally expected. Particularly as the original platform/software gets older. The people working on the original software stack weren't idiots, nor did they spend their days playing tetris. If that software has a couple man-decades worth of effort put into it, your probably not going to be able to rewrite it in less and maintain its functionality and quality.

Can we get a fax.gov?

It's great that there are so many websites that can fax a PDF for you, but theres good cause to not trust them with your private information. Especially given the sort of information a Government service needs to process a claim.

Until the Government can figure out how to make usable websites, fax.gov would be a safer fallback.

It can charge a small fee for service, and maybe whitelist known Government fax numbers (to prevent scammers from convincing people to send data to a scam number).

USEMS (United States Electronic Mail Service) as a branch of USPS is urgently needed. However, it should not be operated in a for-profit manner.

Is anyone working on scaling up approaches like the US Digital Service? It is clear that government is often shafted by contractors that spend very little of the project budget on programmers, and it's starting to hurt people (rather than just being a tax on progress).

Unfortunately the problem is more complex than just contractors. The Government could easily push contractors to hire a larger percentage of programmers, and reject contracts with low programmer head count by claiming that such setups do not appear likely to succeed.

What's the US Digital Service approach?

I've applied for jobless and other benefits on new York and never used a fax machine. I'd complain that the job listings are choked with spam (e.g. A job listed in Ithaca is really in Syracuse, nope, really in Atlanta) but other than that their systems work OK.

The leader of my friend's coven wrote new printer drivers for 390 mainframes because IBM couldn't be bothered to support enough printer ports that NY needs to support the mandate of turning around paperwork in 2 days.

NY really does it: I get my tax returns freaky fast compared to the federal gov. Drivers license and car permit renewals are fast, permits to stock tripod grass carp, whatever.

He's still trying to figure out how to get the required intact wax seal to come thru the fax.

In an alternate timeline, people complain about how much it costs to refill the proprietary wax cartridges for their fax machine.

In an alternate, alternate timeline, carrier pigeons never went extinct and stayed as the height of asynchronous communication... pgsql (now termed PigeonSQL) is built on top of an elaborate system of carrier pigeons holding and moving small scraps of paper around a large warehouse... pigeons carry messages along extraordinarily complex plexiglass tubing so that today's kids can play their latest video games... and the fax machine is nothing but carbon paper, a press, and a paper affixer with a well trained carrier pigeon standing by, the worst part of the upkeep is all the damned bird seed.

Pigeonpunk (patent pending)

Yeah, we get that a lot. Its amazing how many faxes we send for students. In a bigger city the library or a UPS store (or equivalent) can be used, but here we do it for them.

Its the same for things that won't ship to a PO box, as we get some student shipments for students who haven't figured out how to write a BS address the UPS guy would figure out. Expecting people to have actual addresses that result in home delivery is just not something that you can depend on in the US.

Wow. This problem exists in my country's gov entities too. Only as a result of public pressure they finally enacted the "faxes law" demanding public entities to allow digital means of contact. Now they struggle to enforce the law and faxes are still bottle-necking administrative processes.

I used to use online fax services but I never quite felt comfortable with them having my data. So last time I had to, I looked into it a bit and it turns out Twillio has a programmatic fax option, so I signed up for a fax-enabled number and put it in a lambda [1]. Upload the fax somewhere accessible (e.g. dropbox/s3) and sent the url to the handler.

It ended up being really cheap/easy so I keep paying for the fax number now just in case I ever need to do it again.

[1] - https://github.com/J-Swift/lamda-starters/blob/master/exampl...

I'm certainly not justifying the state of affairs, but there are a lot of private institutions that still operate with faxes as well. They'll accept an original document either snail-mailed or faxed. The easier and quicker option is obviously fax.

Of course the fax encoding and their document management system will likely muddy the details up. So the actual person processing the document will call to confirm the details, and half the time you end up emailing them a crystal clear image file anyway.

I think it's more a legal technology and workflow problem than a computing technology problem. When fax machines were new technology, the legal work was done to bless accepting facsimiles of raised seal documents. Now "modern" B2B faxing works good enough, so this work hasn't been done for emailed images. (And ironically with a good scan you can actually see the physical relief of a raised seal)

FWIW another thing I've found is that even when you can upload image files directly to a document management system, you likely want those to be black and white (not greyscale!), otherwise they will be turned to black and white with an unpredictable threshold, also destroying details.

The problem is it's legal to create totally unreasonable processes and expect people to just sort of deal with them.

Back when the fax process was first being implemented, it would have been a convenient advancement. So while your point does have general merit, it's not particularly applicable here.

Related: "Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems (2016) [pdf]"; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783355 ; https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf

"Jot down your specific request and any relevant particulars. Enclose your card. Have your man bring it around and I'll ascertain it makes its way into the right hands. Expect to be notified by post on any conclusions, settlements or further necessary queries. Yours, ~~~~~~~"

I just checked... there are still online fax services.

Serious question: Should I learn COBOL in 2020-0?

It might be lucrative but every account I've seen has said it's endless frustration.

Only if you are interested in working on legacy systems in large bureaucracies.

This may or may not pay well. My understanding is that most of the well paying side of this has actually invested in migrating off COBOL over the last decade.

are they 'translating' so you need to know COBOL or are they just creating new software to the same spec?

My not-very-recent-at-all experience with COBOL is that COBOL is used in the most boring applications at the largest institutions. If you find your self looking for work you might have to move to a different city.

Have you ever said to yourself "self, I really want to work on large, badly maintained accounting and finance systems that should have been retired years ago?"

It is fun, for a little while at least.

No, it's not. Although I guess maybe it's good for society that somebody finds it so.

Learn COBOL and MUMPS, I'm pretty sure both will come up. Only add them to your resume when going for those type of jobs.

COBOL is the perfect skillset for the grad who just studied CS in order to get a job.

I hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings saying that.

the language itself is not usually the main obstacle when it comes to dealing with legacy code.

interfaces between logically distinct parts of the code will be fuzzy or nonexistent. you can't trust comments or sometimes even the names of functions (if the code is this structured at all!). you have to look at what every function you're calling actually does, what global variables it depends on, search for weird cases elsewhere that can change those globals, this type of stuff.

you have to build intuition implicitly from the code about design paradigms the organization used when the code was written. sometimes if the code was actually maintained, you end up learning several sets of paradigms from different eras. at the end of all this, much of your accumulated knowledge might not apply outside of that organization. you could be starting almost from scratch at your next job working on legacy code.

I don't mean to discourage you; it can be quite satisfying. it has almost an archeological feel sometimes. if you're a college student, I might recommend getting into c or c++ instead of cobol though. you'll have a much easier time finding an entry-level job when you graduate, and you'll at least have the option of working on newer projects too.

Short answer: No.

Long answer:

I did COBOL development on mainframes for the Canadian government and Xerox from 1996 - 1998, my first "real jobs" after university.

COBOL in isolation isn't that bad a language. With a bit of discipline ("structured programming") it can be fairly readable. Most of the time it's used for large scale batch record processing in big institutions (e.g., governments, banks, insurance companies).

The problem with using COBOL in a mainframe environment is that mainframes are basically an evolutionary dead end so you're stuck using the associated gunk that has hardly changed since the 70's (editors, JCL, CICS). JCL in particular is notoriously user hostile and has been called "the worst programming language ever designed" by Fred Brooks, who managed its development (http://dtsc.dfw.ibm.com/MVSDS/'HTTPD2.APPS.ZOSCLASS.PDF(ZCLA...).

You can blame the government for that one (not specifically BECAUSE it is the government). They made rules about privacy during an era when tech was still growing. With banking, education, and healthcare, this is a norm. You have to fax because somehow computers are "scary and hard to understand!" so we just still use fax machines.

This is also what happens when you have a government that doesn't act proactively to hire people who are competent and gets people as the lowest bidder or a stable wage that never.changes...

Heh, maybe we will finally get an honest “follow the money” moment in NY and we’ll get to see exactly why they are still on fax.

Why rewrite a system that's working? This is why. You can't just coast on the amazing system someone built in the 1970s. Because in a crisis, no one is left who knows how to scale it up. Most of the devs from the 1970s have retired. Make jokes about NodeJS or Rails if you want, but right now NJ and NY could find a ton of Node devs.

I’m sure they’d be happy to authorize a rewrite - as long as you can do it in two weeks, breaking every task down to a four-point “story” before you’ve even looked at the scope.

Politicians are elected based not skill but marketing. The hardest job for them is to win elections and then they use connections to make money. At least in eastern eu. If politicians would need to be tested and can be easily fired maybe they can do smth. But in todays system it's nearly impossible.

Question: Sure, we can send you anything you need, you just need to fax us your ID. Answer: I can not do sofrom where I am now. Question: Why so? Were are you located? Answer: 21st century

I get that these are hardware/software issues, but this is the same deferred maintenance gotcha that's plagued public infrastructure generally.

Years of voting for leopards to eat welfare recipients' faces turns out to bite people in the face when they become the welfare recipients.

Wow, awarded contract to TCS. That’s going to go well.

what's tcs?

Tata Consultancy Services (I think).

That was my take away. Imagine awarding these government contracts to foreign body shops

New York could hire their unemployed software engineers to replace the backend for their unemployment system. It would make something positive from the situation.

It seems the contract was granted some time ago (2017?) so it's unlikely this is a choice. But yes, I think municipal/local government contracts should look to source these things locally

From the article..

Last year, it awarded a $56 million, five-year contract for that solution to Tata Consultancy Services

Boeing tried that. Went really well.

It will go remarkably well for TCS...billing millions and millions and millions of dollars for years on end...

Surprisingly the film industry still uses fax machines. And some use FileMaker Pro believe it or not.

all the fax and COBOL talk today, this throwback comic has come up a few times:

In the 24th century... https://abstrusegoose.com/323

Paywall so... archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20200405204230/https://www.nytim...

There is no app for that?

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