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To be fair, usage has likely dropped commensurate with staffing!
>These government systems by necessity are not very complex
I don't believe this is correct. CMS has a bunch of their source code on their website. The COBOL parts are quite expansive and there is probably a whole lot more out there: https://www.cms.gov/PricerSourceCodeSoftware
Look, I have no issue with wanting to modernize government systems. An organization I used to idolize, the US Digital Service, did this as their full time gig... and most of them were just axed. I'm not sure a few 19 year olds are going to do better than this organization. It's hard work.
The profit, which is what actually matters is up.
> I'm not sure a few 19 year olds are going to do better than this organization. It's hard work.
The problem was never technical. Ever tried to get stuff done in a bloated corporation full of incompetent people that just want to keep their jobs and don't want you to expose how relatively incompetent they are, especially the management? Things that a competent engineer in a startup could do in a day, are impossible to do. And in a government it's probably 1000-fold so.
Dumping some data from legacy system to a modern one is not a problem. The problem is firing people that can't deal with change. "You don't know what you're doing. Everything is sooo complex. You're going to break it. I've been doing it for 50 years, I know what's right."
Citation needed.
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Given revenue is been steadily dropping since Musk purchased it and is now down to 2014 levels (roughly 1/10th of it's peak year, which is the year before Musk bought it) and it is burdened by huge amounts of debt, it would be impressive indeed if it was making a profit.
Dumping data from some legacy system to a modern one is a MASSIVE problem. Extremely well paid and experienced software engineers regularly hose their infra migrating from one system to another, and it's a near certainty that these commercial products don't have the complexity of of the whatever critical US Government system these kids from DOGE are mucking about in.
People believing what they want to belive.
Not to mention that you talk about revenue and users, because it's hard to deny that technically Twitter is still working just fine, and now even has some new features, while in the past they were coasting tweaking their html for years.
On this very websites, all the "experts" in the industry were bidding how quickly Twitter will collapse after Musk fired all these "irreplaceable" people. Same ones that after 15 year still don't understand how Bitcoin works, or how it can have beneficial impact on the energy market.
I'm guessing you haven't met anyone who's actually worked on any of these system.
This is possibly one of the most absurd takes I've read on HN in a while. I'm imagining someone trying to learn how a PC game programmed in Assembly works going 'how hard could it be, PCs in the 90s weren't that complex'
I also trust government workers to give fair representation of their work. And what you SWE write on their resumes or what OKRs when filling time to justify paycheck. :D
They're a couple of database "tables" and formulas, what else they would supposed to be, think about it. They might be archaic, they might gnarly, limited etc. but they are no match for a modern next.js with react, in a docker container on a VM, running in a AWS datacenter, managed by Terraform, yadaydayda...