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There is a chain. There is legal recourse. And there are considerations in government IT that you would not believe and they are incredibly difficult to deal with on minimal resources. It has to be harder than the private sector and this application isn't any different than buggy mainframe software run by major banks. It sits and gets crufty.

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This is a new system that replaced a previous one not that long ago. This isn't some crazy old thing running COBAL on a VAX somewhere that nobody understands anymore.

The old COBOL crap is more likely to have been implemented by someone with a clue.

The “new” systems are usually aping the old system behavior. In one case, I ran into a system where some company converted COBOL transactions into Java with some sort of automated tool to put the legacy system “on the internet”.

I have no idea what that means, for newer is not necessarily more supportable. Who knows what the system is - maybe they had a multi-million dollar SAP implementation to manage prisons, and now you’re looking for functional support of that platform after it was customized all to hell, you need a-team SAP resources, not the new kid at Wipro... I can only imagine what’s behind that curtain. It’s the government so I imagine the worst.

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