I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.
And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.
The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier
If that’s what you want they should be staffing up instead of firing.
Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.
What do you expect? most of the guys in “DOGE” weren’t even alive on 9/11 I’m a bit surprised that they still have something in COBOL, maintenance probably costs o fortune, good luck finding young COBOL devs
These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?
Yeah that’s not the defense you think it is.
Could you elaborate on why?
You shouldn’t be using cobol in 2025
They would have to spend on new systems instead of giving tax breaks to corporate welfare queens and the landed gentry.
Money isn’t the issue
Elaborate as to what the specific issue is, please.
There are tons of IT systems in the government that have been running the same programming for 30+ years but if it isn’t broke it doesn’t get touched.
Source: Use mainframe emulators often to perform routine tasks in government HR systems.
Yeah that doesn’t make it ok
Yeah, great. Is DOGE going to fix any of that?
Probably
That’s a delusional answer.
…not. probably not. That’s what you meant to say. Right? Right!!!
so the huge legacy codebase should be ported to…
and who’s gonna do that? You?
The terrifying answer is that script kiddies will end up porting it to JavaScript and Electron and host it on AWS.
I wanted to write JavaScript first but decided against it :D
This hasn’t been done because no one can do it. It’s because the government sucks at this stuff
It hasn’t been done because that’s a great works project that’s on a scale you’re woefully ignorant to (this is an assumption on my part based on what I can grok of you based on your comments here).
I assure you there is a bevy of skilled developers who would love to modernize the systems they work on but the cost and level of effort is beyond what is politically viable.
If you changed your perspective from “it’s awful and bad and always will be” to “it’s awful and bad and we can make it better, how can I help” things will improve for everyone.
I guarantee you that there are no governments, banks, or businesses older than 15 years that aren’t running some old ass code that’s not getting replaced any time soon.
They also found that there’s people over 200, so that default date thing doesn’t really explain it all.
It’s because that explanation isn’t correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.
Note that isn’t a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of ‘everyone’ with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don’t do it.
Social Security numbers were first issued in 1937. You would have need someone to be over 110 in 1937 to have an age over 200. I think that it’s a combination of birthdays entered wrong plus no official death date.
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Wouldn’t matter anyway the ss admin automatically stops pay and initiates audit for anything over 115.
Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I’m sure there is a larger answer.
However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn’t even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.
It’s definitely still concerning if the database has a large number of errors. But systematic fraud would be much worse ofc.
the database doesn’t have to necessarily be accurate if there’s other checks - a flag for test data, a system that checks the person is real against another database before dispersing funds etc
That’s true. Would be better if it was though.
Fixing an archival dataset that doesn’t even pertain to people actively receiving benefits is so far down the list of priorities as to be a criminal misuse if resources.
Someone with the skills and knowledge to clean up 150-year old typographical errors in one particular table in the Social Security database system would probably provide more benefit to the taxpayers covering their salary by doing some other task.
It might be better to move to a new database at this point rather than trying to fix the existing one. It won’t give immediate benefits but could be helpful down the line.
Or it could cost a fortune and fuck a lot of other processes up.
I am hoping California ditches SSN and other identifiers from the US Treasury. That information is no longer safe, so we need a fresh database that is secure from DOGE fuckery, among many other hostile actors.
Lol why bring drugs into this? Specifically ketamine?
Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn’t. Don’t dis teen coders.
How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?
I studied COBOL a bit in college and it’s not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason …
Learning to COBOL is not itself that hard.
Understanding decades of “business” logic is.
It isn’t WHAT it is doing, it’s WHY it is doing it that makes these systems labyrinthian.
Also afaik they don’t get paid that well which is part of the problem.
I don’t know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc…
There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.
You wouldn’t say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven’t had the time to get to greybeard level yet
this is why, if they heavily modified the code in such a short time and they couldn’t understand it: it proves there was a previous data breach and they’re just installing the pre-written patches… the smoking gun that i can’t explain to anyone
That makes way too much sense.
tbf it’s only embarrassing if you’re capable of embarrassment.
But but it’s BREAKING! With a red light emoji!
Honestly, if you make it to 150 you deserve the money
I can’t wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.
In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.
In my experience in the legacy world we have the isHighDate function which not only checks the constant, but also 5 other edge cases where the value isn’t HIGH_DATE but should be treated as if it is.
More specifically, they didn’t find anyone receiving social security who were 150 years old because they didn’t prove that they were receiving anything as that’s not the purpose of that database.
In before Musk says “You think the government uses COBOL?!”
Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL…
So do many older private companies.
Like banks. Account balances, transactions.
Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.
Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider ‘modernity’ is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.
We’re gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and … there just isn’t anyone who actually knows how to do it.
He would dismiss COBOL and try to prove that he is a super cool geek with a deep knowledge of DnD and gaming culture. So more like:
“COBOL? Such a language doesn’t even exist unless you think Kobolds are real! Hahaha”
I don’t think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.
It doesn’t matter what I think or know, the government uses COBOL.
LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL
They’d probably just delete the Cobol code since “nobody would use that old stuff anyway”.
2016-2020 was the age of too stupid to break everything. Now we’re staring down the barrel of “The files are in the computer?” But the entire US government is the computer.
I dont even program and i could’ve told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol “durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11”
Also predates social security. It’s the long con for sure.
More likely they nuke it due to that lack of understanding.
As someone who is working on a project of recreating an enterprise application in a modern tech stack, the legacy code is hard to understand too.
We have something similar in that a ClaimClosedDate is defaulted to 01/01/1900 and if it has that date it means it’s not closed whereas now that would be a nullable field.
