Comment by abigail95

Basically this. The people running the show would desperately like to make it simpler, but ultimately it’s left overly complicated due to priorities from past leadership well above our paygrade.

The right solution is always to just rip off the bandaid and do it again by hand in a new language or platform, and to eliminate useless complexity while doing so. Unfortunately no leader would ever do this because the Board and/or Shareholders would crucify them for not outsourcing it to McKinsey first and using the fancy-pants automation tool their report recommended.

Good for you, it means either your system was sufficiently simple to be fully implemented in 3 months from scratch including all business rules, or you build a new system which left out some amount of rules from the original system without this posing a problem. I don't know much about how central banks work so that might be possible. But not all systems present those characteristics.

For some reason those comments always seem to imply that every business doesn't have these problems too.

Every business has these problems. In most cases, the ones who don't change get swept away. The places that do not change are usually ones that can't go out of business. But every place has systems like this, you have to rebuild them, it isn't fun but there is no choice.

A tiny system like the DVLA is complex, hilarious (this is the same place that has had to reduce service provision because some staff just stopped turning up for weeks after Covid, public-sector productivity in the UK is at the same level as 1997, to just get to the same level as the private sector...which isn't growing productivity very fast...you would need to fire ~2m workers, the total workforce in the UK is 30m btw).

> Think bigger.

One of the easier parts of this involves addressing, which in the UK is notoriously easy, reliable, and easy to process - especially the best-in-class Ordnance Survey stuff like AddressBase Premium, right?

A quick trawl of Github will shed some light on it - especially how much of a pain it is to get ABP into a usable state - and this is data that's core and integral to the service, the "are you a real user, a typo, a fraudster, a data supply issue, or getting things wrong in good or bad faith?" kind of business logic.

And it's doubly hard, because the government requires people to update their license when they change address - which often enough involves a new-build property, where the address (let alone UPRN - sometimes even the USRN!) is completely new to you.

Thinking bigger: imagine sitting at your desk during the first couple of weeks on the job, database validation checks running merrily in the background while you're staring at a screen. There's a mild frown forming on your face. You'd been scrolling over a list of rejected records in front of you, largely looking good - _how did they miss THAT fraud _ you'd briefly chuckled to yourself - but _this_ one...

It's a valid business entity, trading from the valid address, and you've hand-checked both _and_ got a junior who lives nearby to send you a photo of it, and, well, the wit running the business has decided to trade under the name _FUCKOFFEE_, and... that's... just going to have to be someone else's problem, you shrug.

(to be clear: the hard part of the DVLA project is _not_ implementing the coding, database, and systems design work)

Yeah, I always raise an eyebrow at attitudes like that too.

I've also reimplemented or gradually replaced several out-of-date systems. Albeit on a smaller scale.

In my experience, when you start picking the programs apart you find 90% of the code is redundant or boilerplate. Much of it isn't even called from anywhere, abandoned code, and can be deleted en masse. A lot of programmers don't clean code up "just in case" and then no-one else deletes it.

They can also often be vastly simplified because programmers back then didn't have the patterns and knowledge to write consisely.

I often find myself simplifying the original code first, which gets rid of 50% of it. Then I can see what the code actually does and rewrite it which gets rid of the other 40%.

On the other hand, many programmers don't have the patience, stubbornness or skill to do this kind of work.

And the ability to get through the major panic you have when you're half way through and wondering if you were mad to even start.

> Rebuilding a legacy system doesn't require you to support every single edge case that the older system did.

Depends on context.

This isn't some social media fun site where you can live with some rough edges; in this context "edge case" may be someone with an health condition who is still entitled to a drivers license; or it could be someone who normally could get one but due to a health condition really shouldn't be allowed one!

This generally isn’t true in the case of government systems. For the most part they are performing tasks that are required by law, and it is not acceptable to stop some of them, even temporarily. If you’re lucky you can run the old and new systems side-by-side while the 100% feature migration occurs, but that isn’t always feasible.

The point is until you start ripping the application apart you have no idea what the internal logic looks like.

When you look you can find terrors that will haunt you in the night where some ancient limit, say number of columns in a database end up holding multiple structures that are getting if/then'd later in the application.

I would completely and totally believe there is code just like that.

Ya I don't think I'd let you in two miles of a system like this.

Replacing legacy stuff always expands in scope far beyond the initial changes.

When you have to come back and add wait() entries in your new program because it spits data back faster than the old program ever could which then causes peripheral devices/drivers to crash which then pulls a dev and testers off something else important for days figuring out what kind of fresh hell is occurring is just status quo for ancient systems.

> The DVLA dataset and the computations that are run on it can be studied and replicated in 3 months by a competent team. From there it can be improved.

Such an HN comment. Made me lol. Think funnier!

it's a gov agency, they don't quite pay enough for a motivated competent team....

This is what we call cherry-picking stats. You pick a single stat but ignore everything else. Your comment seems to imply that the UK government has been lying about austerity for 10 years. While I don't trust the tory party and think they're corrupt with their deals-for-buddies approach, I don't think they outright lie for 10 years.

The policing budget is so bare-bones that the police have literally admitted they will not attend all 999 calls. To make that clear, they have admitted if you call them in an emergency they may not show up. NHS waiting times are sky-high. The number of NHS hospitals and beds are rock bottom. We can dig and dig into various public sectors and see them being terrible because of austerity. Which Labour is kinda being forced to continue due to the effects of covid on the finincals of the UK (and Brexit)

Public sector employment is at a high because we had to hire thousands of staff due to Brexit… probably the most stupid productivity destroying own goal a country has ever committed (so far)

Are you suggesting that a process once done using pen and paper can't possibly be complicated?

I have no insight into the DVLA, but the idea that no paper process could ever be complicated is really funny. The UK enjoyed/loathed centuries of bureaucracy before computers were invented. At one point getting a divorce required an Act of Parliament specifically naming the unhappy couple! Being restricted to pen and paper hardly inhibited the human ability to create complex systems.

> The system may or may not be complex but the data is has to store and transform is not. Because it handles drivers licenses. A function that has been done on pen and paper and filing cabinets.

It handles more than just driving licenses... The DVLA do more than just driving licenses.

> Since you imply you know more about UK budgets than I do - how much is the DVLA budgeted for IT operations like this and how much more would you give them to expect this problem solved?

It's not budgeted anything for this as far as I know. I believe it's handled by Government Digital Services which handles lots of the digital services for various departments. The budget for all of GDS is about 90 million most of which isn't for .gov.uk. A rewrite of that size I would expect to cost about 50-60 million in total but take several years.

Central government departments have been cut too… the staff needed for the Brexit disaster disguise this