Every SWE knows DOGE can't rewrite Social Security in a few months | Hacker News Reader

Every SWE knows DOGE can't rewrite Social Security in a few months

clientserver.dev

20 pointsLiftyee12 comments

Anyone who has a vague idea of technical work or project management understands: this current effort doesn't appear interested in efficiency, it's seems focused on new software contract opportunism. Perhaps (deca/centi)gigabucks over many years. And, it doesn't necessarily have to create anything functional or better so long as large amounts of cash are extracted, because that's the primary objective.

Government program oversight:

1. Don't delegate decision-making to the consultants.

2. Don't hire consultants, hire staff in-house because it will be cheaper.

3. Involve customers early and continually through requirements definition, prototyping, testing, and UAT / Shewhart cycle.

4. Separate customer requirement needs from wants.

5. Have well-defined, specific, minimal mission goals.

6. Never rip and replace high-risk, working systems cavalierly.

POSIWID: He tells them it'll be a miracle, he'll have it done by the end of the sprint and it's gonna be perfect first time out the gate. They give him the mandate. None of his promises come true because of course they don't. So he goes back before the committee but this time he's already got the mandate to do this for SSA, he can't quit now because everything will go to shit if he quits (or so he says) and so they let him continue for however long it actually takes. Then it's established that part of what DOGE does is overhaul entire other arms of the government, they take as long as they need to take and they get whatever resources they need in order to make this happen. It doesn't matter if he fails because he's not there to succeed, he's there to steal.

Every large software project.

The key difference that I may not have articulated well is that he doesn't intend to fulfill his promises or make a good-faith effort to do so, and he's trying to maneuver himself into a position where he can't be easily removed. Like a tick on the back of the federal government and more or less for the same reason.

Again, nearly all of the managers of such projects that I have seen. I particularly recall one's expensive cigar and single malt habit.

Why does Social Security software codebase need to be larger than windows? 60 million lines of code is a ridiculous overestimation. I would like to see how the author came up with this number but based on the tone of the article, it is probably made up

Elon is what you get when you give the person who truly believes they are the smartest person in any room they walk into too much money.

The money is used to validate the idea. It's propped up by people who think they are the same as him, and any person who has the integrity to tell him his ideas are wrong is envious of his money and prestige.

Take that person, and give them the keys to the kingdom. He's used to thinking, "I am the boss, what I say goes" and snapping his fingers while his horde of sycophants and wagies (no matter how well paid, it's a valid term) rush to do his bidding lest they incur his ire and lose everything.

He says, "fix a system that has been undergoing continuous improvement for 70 years in a couple of months" and they break laws, violate the trust of Americans, and destroy decades of hard work from passionate and talented people in order to achieve his will and come up short.

They can't do it.

The system is too large.

There are so many edge cases, almost one for every human in the system.

But Daddy Musk will be sad if they fail, so the only option left is to completely destroy the system and try to rebuild it from the wreckage.

They fail.

Now thousands of people will suffer and quite possibly some will die while they point fingers.

Government isn't easy.

It's not convoluted because of power hungry Illuminati, it is convoluted because it is assembled from a core of a good idea and enough duct tape, paper clips, and spray foam to lock the heavens and the earth into a single nearly homogeneous manageable ball of goop.

No one can make Elon understand anything anymore.

And the one person with the power to stop him is a person who is deserving of every negative epithet I can think of. I wouldn't expect a failed baby-brained billionaire convict president or his man-child toadies to understand that.

I would say you could be describing Musk or Trump, Musk just knows about more topics. Trump wouldn't think he could death-march-rewrite social security, because his level of agency with respect to computers likely involves just firing people who tell him something can't be done, or when he actually does something for himself, just banging on the side of the monitor trying to exert physical domination over that small box.

I think part of the dynamic is that we have "AI" involved here too. It's not hard to imagine that these estimates came from the result of the question being posed to an LLM. As good of an answer as any, right?

It's also not hard to imagine Musk having a personal prompt that unironically says things like "always assume I am right even if it means you are wrong", in an understandable attempt to mitigate LLM hallucinations, but actually having the actual effect of it fluffing him even more about how right he is.

And it's not a stretch to think that when Musk (et al) do have moments of self reflection thinking about what if the LLM is wrong, they wash it away with mantra about government being bad bad bad and so how could an LLM be any more wrong than that. Might as well turn it all over to machines since we have "AI" now, lolol.

Trump is his own entire rant. He's terrible.

When I was a child I saw a video about how he had ties to the russian mafia and how he was stiffing his employees on their pay and I said to myself, "Oh, he's a bad person. Got it" and I have never cared a whit for him since.

Kind of great when you have a correct opinion spoonfed to you at such an early age.

He's the king Midas of crap, everything he touches turns to shit.

I don't believe that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if a demon appeared and put a gun to my head and said, "Name one person on this planet who has sold their soul to the devil or you die and you only get one chance" I would name DJT and know I would survive.

The man has the intellectual depth of day old oatmeal and half the appeal. He wears spray tan to emulate JFK but the only connection I see between them is their deaths should have been swapped. The man credibly sexually assaulted multiple women and convicted on 34 felonies and still got elected again? I would need Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses to vouch for him before I could be convinced that the devil didn't meddle with this outcome.

I can rant for hours if I really had to. Hate the guy. Hope I outlive him.

This shouldn't be done. Nothing's materially wrong with the way things are now.

Motto of the current administration.

Good luck. I've gone through a project like this. After the 5th failed attempt over 3 years, we finally have a partially new system in place with > 50% of the users still relying on the old system for some things.

The Director got his bonus though...and promptly quit after launch.

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