Comment by simpaticoder

>Or, there's a lot of other ways to "skin this cat", depending on exactly how the legacy app is designed, and exactly how it stores data. But, probably this is already implemented

Given that neither of us knows the actual systems in question, what is more likely, that it's a well-designed system or one that has organically accreted over time? It seems like you tend to believe the former, and I the latter. I suppose my view is based on the fact that, like in statmech, you enumerate all possible systems that can do a particular job, the vast majority of those solutions will not have any organizing principle and will not be amenable to surgical analysis or change.

This implies good faith actor, which is not the case.

You know that annoying thing where someone joins a new team, looks around, declares all their friction points to be easily solvable, dives in & starts making changes, and turns out to make a big giant mess?

And the reason is they don't understand the specific domain & context well enough to know what the actual hard problems are. Instead they're just pattern matching to things they do know and extrapolating. And it usually doesn't go well.

Dealing with a system that's replicating 50 years of regulatory rules is going to be that times infinity.

>They don't even know how to build a website that works.

What percentage of people who know how to make a "website" do you think could make an automated tax system?

>the tech industry has been the beating heart of this country

Agriculture? Construction? The heart means something without which you can't function. How did people in the 1950s survive?

The USG does in fact know how to build a website and it is intellectually lazy (so very lazy) to suggest otherwise. A high profile illustration of this is login.gov, which is SSO used across USG agencies. It's not possible to take a comment like this seriously, at all.

Elon Musk is also not an auditor. DOGE is not an auditing entity. You bring in accountants to audit. These are 20 y/o something programmers. How DOGE has been operating has been completely opaque and this lack of transparency just plays to the point that what someone says their goals are and what their actual goals are are not mutually exclusive, so no, Elon Musk shouldn't be allowed anywhere near these systems.

"fixing the government" in this case seems to mean "destroy the government" for somewhat hidden purposes.

DOGE literally took over the agency that competently modernized and integrated US gov technology (United States Digital Service), gutted it, and is now using that agency's pretense of needing access to data to now pilfer citizens' private information and grossly violate the constitutional separation of powers.

This is the mechanism by which this administrative coup (declared here in https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensu...) is being enacted. None of this is legal or constitutional in any way.

The rule of law is not a partisan issue nor a matter of "government efficiency". Those who aid this coup should be considered traitors.

If it ain’t broke.. move fast and break things?

All I've seen about this DOGE stuff is negativity based on hypotheticals, this is the first optimistic hypothetical I've seen so far.

It's an interesting point. As a thought exercise, tech is absolutely the core of modern America, #1 export (I assume) and a key market. Private sector influence probably can give huge amounts of low hanging fruit.

I think peoples main concerns stem from not trusting Trump (which seems odd given he's a second term president, he is objectively wanted) and not trusting Musk (which is probably fair, he's publicly and openly an arsehole).

Speed probably concerns people too, however "move fast and break things" is a pretty fundamental American tech mantra, so entirely unsurprising and usually effective.

> That's why all this stuff is backed up to an iron mountain.

When one of your threat vectors is a massive ball of nuclear fire right on top of the federal government in DC, your offsite backup policy is going to be absurd overkill by the standards of any other organization on this planet. That doesn't mean it's flawed.

> ...many of the people in charge don't even know how to use a website. Now for the first time, tech industry people have the opportunity to help run these computer systems, and you're afraid they're the ones who'll be incompetent and accidentally break everything?

Are you honestly suggesting that the people who built these systems, maintained them, and updated them to reflect often significant changes in rules and regulations over the course of decades somehow don't know how those systems work? If they were so damned clueless, those COBOL systems would have sputtered out and died decades ago. The fact that they've continued to run for all this time is practically prima facie evidence that the system works just fine by industry standards for that kind of legacy code.

No doubt there's plenty of stuff buried in the codebase that bugs the hell out of the developers working on it, but you get that with any complex legacy code. It's the nature of the beast. Do you think there's nothing in Google's monorepo that some of their engineers don't quite like but doesn't rise to a big enough issue to warrant refactoring right now? Any other FAANG company? Or large tech company in general?

You're writing as though a bunch of junior developers--and that describes pretty much all of the publicly known DOGE employees so far--are wizards who can just waltz right in and magic up a better solution just because they're from the "tech industry."

Setting aside the unlikely chances that those juniors--no matter how skilled or talented--have any experience with COBOL, mainframes, or even just decades-old legacy code, is anyone going to suggest that something like the federal government's payment system isn't defined by an immense amount of complex business logic so as to comply with legislative requirements? It's not something you just start playing around with.

I can't think of any tech company that would take a junior developer, toss them overboard in the middle of the freezing Atlantic, grant them sudo access, and tell them to do whatever the hell they want with critical systems before they drown and--somehow--take the ship with them. Worse yet, those juniors were chosen for ideology fervor and/or purity, so what happens when the normal review processes and experienced senior developers are pushed aside because they're in the way and part of the "deep state conspiracy" that doesn't want them to "[fix] the government" as you put it?

Not only is that a recipe for disaster for the company itself, it's a damned good way to take an otherwise talented junior developer and permanently ruin them. Instead of mentoring them so they can work well as part of a team, you're basically creating a toxic working environment that's going to turn them all feral. By the time they crawl out the other side and the public hears all about what they've been up to, what company is going to be stupid enough to a developer with "DOGE" on their resume? Beyond that, you're conflating a whole bunch of different issues here with federal software contracts and IT, while putting the tech industry on a really peculiar pedestal.

Besides, if the goal is to discover waste/fraud/abuse, the obvious answer is to hire a bunch of forensic accountants and let them dig into everything. Those are the people who actually find that kind of stuff, and they're incredibly skilled at their job. If it's there, given the time, they'll find it. But it's a slow-going process, so we instead see a bunch of engineers focusing on random transactions so they can ask themselves (1) "do I like that one?" and (2) "do I think it's legitimate?" because it's faster.

That's not exactly how you fix anything, least of all a country.

> What's with you people

Right?

> For decades the tech industry has been the beating heart of this country that's kept the American dream alive

By "tech industry" do you mean the consumer surveillance industry? Maybe your vision of the American dream involves inescapable corporate control, but mine certainly doesn't!