The Government's Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified

theatlantic.com

10 points·throwworhtthrow··3 comments

This is getting aggressively flagged (last attempt to discuss this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972899)

However I'd like discuss an aspect of it that I haven't seen mentioned before:

How unpleasant is it for a developer to write code for ancient systems day-to-day, systems like the ones DOGE is blitzing now? (I've never had the misfortune of working on a 50 year old codebase.) I imagine it takes quite a while to get familiar with it, and the DOGE team is probably only working with a surface understanding. Maybe they aren't even trying to work within the code codebase and deployments. Certainly not with an eye for future maintenance. Would future delveopers' productivity be made materially worse if someone had, say, hurriedly proxied some part of the system through nginx to crudely hack certain API calls?

Regardless of whether the DOGE work is legal or with honest intentions, won't this mad dash of changes potentially make all future development on these even more burdensome?

If any modernization is yo be done. It should be done by any trustworthy and reputable. Not someone who brags about credentials.

I agree. But can we all agree that simply because it's old, or difficult that it shouldn't be a reason not to do it? Eventually, we have to swallow the bitter pill that spending is out of control and that it has to be reigned in. The government should never be as big as it is, spending as much as it spends, with its fingers in as many pies as it is now.

It's clear that there has been little to no transparency or oversight on a lot of these things/systems.

So, one way or another, that has to change.

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