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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

Q: Is that what's happening here? That SpaceX engineers are rewriting the Social Security payment system in some modern programming language?

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The article doesn't really give any good details. We don't know enough to say what the process is. We're just supposed to be upset that young bright engineers are working on the system that until a month ago everyone would have agreed is a pile of garbage.

I'd love to know more about what the plan is - but as a older software engineer "young smart kids attempt to start maintaining ancient abandoned but important codebase" is good news, not bad news. It's what we beg for in Slack all day long.

Do we know that guy is bright? And do we beg for that? I was 25 years old and thought I can do everything. Now I know better and would definitely not trust myself going into such a system. I was in many companies and especially if it comes to payment systems I see the same mistakes over and over again.

If there is atleast a good supervision, then sure it might work.

> Do we know that guy is bright?

One of the other guys won the Vesuvius Challenge, so I’d say probably.

'everyone would have agreed" - no, please provide any basis to that or you're veering into the "common sense" and "many people, some straight from central casting with tears in their eyes" BS

A month ago you would have argued that the computer systems backing our tax return filings were in a good shape? Fair enough, but color me shocked.

Point me to anything that shows they were bad Anyway, DOGE was supposed to be finding inefficiencies not rewriting the codebase, how much is that saving?

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