This has the stench of junior engineer all over it. This rewrite will go way over budget and come limping across the finish line late, with more bugs and less features than the system it replaces. I guarantee it.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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AI is going to write it.
1000% percent. If they can't even figure out how dates work in COBOL we are getting a vibe coded SSA. Let's hope they trained LLMs on COBOL or we are cooked.
"ROFL"
Signed, everyone who has been involved in migrating a codebase before.
I mean this is a great example of what happens when you put conservative men in power who think they know what they are doing but are just going to loudly, incompetently and incorrectly re-invent the wheel while everyone else suffers from not having an actual practical solution.
Okay but have you ever tried just throwing genAI at the problem and not caring about the consequences?
Yep, months is a joke, doubly so when talking about tens of millions of lines of code and also COBOL specifically.
This is going to be a hilarious disaster but not so hilarious when people who need the benefits need them and won't be able to get them.
I'm on SSDI (and Medicaid and HUD housing) and have been having insane anxiety the last month and a half to the point that I'm wondering if I'll even get paid in April. I regularly check my SSA account online to make sure my direct deposit is still freaking scheduled. Missing a payment could mess up all of my other benefits as well.
I know the fuck up is coming, but I don't know if I can handle another few months hoping they don't fuck up the migration if they don't fuck up just paying people first with all that's been going on.
I'm pretty sure Im not the only one in this situation who can't handle the stress of this bullshit.
To be fair. We assume "months" means less than 2 years. But 10 years can also be "months", and is probably a more realistic timeline.
Nobody is referring to 10 years as "months".
When you're talking about multiples of years, it's going to be called years, not months. They were obviously talking about a short timeline, less than 2 years, likely less than 1 year.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
Like I said, months is a joke.
So was what I said. I was presenting a hypothetical way they justify their ridiculous claims by doing something else ridiculous.
But conveying tone in text is difficult, so I'm not surprised you missed what I was going for.
Ah yes, a classic tale...
"We're going to take this perfectly efficient and functional COBOL code base and rewrite it in Java! And we'll do it in a few months!"
So many more competent people and organizations than them have already tried this and spectacularly crashed and burned. There are literal case studies on these types of failed endeavors.
I bet they'll do it in Waterfall too.
It's interesting. If they use Grok, this could well be the deathknell for vibe programming (at least for now). It's just fucking tragic that their hubris will cause grief and pain to so many Americans - and cost the lives of more than a few.
Edit: Fixed some typos.
Jokes aside, nothing wrong with rewriting in Java. It is well-suited for this kind of thing.
Rewriting it in anything without fully understanding the original code (the fact they think 150yo are collecting benefits tells me they don't) is the biggest mistake here. I own codebases much smaller than the SSA code and there are still things I don't fully understand about it AND I've caused outages because of it.
No. Java is not suited for this. This code runs on mainframes not some x86 shitbox cluster of dell blades. They literally could not purchase the hardware needed to switch to java in the timeline given. I get what you're trying to say but in this case Java is a hard no.
Uh, Java is specifically supported by IBM in the Power and Z ISA, and they have both their own distribution, and guides for writing Java programs for mainframes in particular.
This shouldn't be a surprise, because after Cobol, Java is the most enterprise language that has ever enterprised.
How old do you think the mainframes running Social Security are?
Probably a mix of Z systems, that stuff goes back 20-odd years, and even then older code can still run on new Z systems which is something IBM brags about.
Mainframes aren't old they're just niche technology, and that includes enterprise Java software.
Think further back. Like late 80s to 90s IBM
Yeah, that's what they said, 20 years or so ago
Ok this is gonna hurt. 2005 was 20 years ago
Non programmer but skilled with computers type guy here: what makes Java well suited for this?
This is probably an incorrect prejudice of mine, but I always thought those old languages are simpler and thus faster. Didn’t people used to rip on Java for being inefficient and too abstracted?
Last language I had any experience with was C++ in high school programming class in the early 2000s, so I’m very ignorant of anything modern.
Java can be pretty damn efficient for long running processes because it optimizes at runtime. It also can use new hardware features (like cpu instructions) without having to compile for specific platforms so in practice it gets a boost there. Honestly, the worst thing about Java is the weird corporate ecosystem that produces factoryfactory and other overengineered esoteric weirdness. It can also do FFI with anything that can bind via c ABI so if some part of the program needed some hand optimized code like something from BLAS it could be done that way.
All that to say it doesn't matter what language they use anyway, because rewriting from scratch with a short timeline is an insane thing to do that never works.
I've worked on teams converting legacy code for most of my life. The planning for something like this would take longer than six months.
If this proceeds in Trump's corrupt government, Elon will get the contract, will claim it is too broken to salvage, and will privatize it. The only way this goes anywhere is if Trump and musk stand to gain money, and they stand to gain a lot.
If they planned a 1 month migration of a small component, 6 months to complete would be pretty lucky imo. Refactoring Legacy Code mentions the 2.0 approach they're taking. Spoiler alert, it doesn't work...
Just determining the requirements would be a nightmare.
In theory, it wouldn't be a necessarily bad idea to port the COBOL code to something more modern, but I cannot trust Muskrat and a few vibe coder youngsters with this task.
Bro. Check it out bro, we're gonna like make it this dope Electron app, bro. It'll interface with X, bro and everyone will have to login there to get their money, bro. Don't worry tho, you'll get paid in recession-proof Trumpbux crypto currency as long as you claim it in time. But X gets a fee of 60% bro.
Seriously bro we like hired a bunch of grads that took a one week X created code boot camp that like you know revolved around a language big balls created called "cyber coin purse++". On second thought bro we're rewriting it in that. Should be like 2 weeks to rewrite it cuz old people wrote the current code and they're like old or whatever bro. Like I live in an old person's basement and they're just like old, bro.
Australian here.
They are robbing you
🌍🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Therapist: Stop being silly, you can't hear emojis.
^ the emojis
Wait, emojis are audible?
There are only two reasons softwares goes for decades without being replaced:
- It’s so unimportant that nobody uses it
- It’s so important that the last major bug was squashed 15 years ago
As long as Big Ballz is running things, I’m sure it will all be fine!
/s
Gonna blow up the database as many times as they blow up SpaceX rockets.
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If SS payments stop, there will be hundreds of thousands of people with nothing left to lose.
Suicide bombers on mobility scooters. Be very afraid.
Over 70 million including many retirees, orphans, and disabled workers. The people most in need of help and the reason that trying to run a government like a capitalist business is one of the dumbest forms of government organization ever. A quick way to radicalize someone against you is to harm their family or take their money.
My mom is over 80. Little old suburban white lady. She already volunteered - "Just get me close." She'd be super-thrilled to have her shot with a suicide vest.
I also know a 93-year-old lady who has loudly talked about taking a few of the bastards with her. The sentiment may be more widespread than we think.
Reminds me of that thing Lex Luthor did where he sponged off rounding errors in financial transactions
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"…but sir, we only know Node.js…"
Musk would probably think that's just fine.
Server-side javascript is an abomination, but there's more of it around than you might think.
Node.js is a fantastic tool for web servers. Its event loop allows it to rival much lower-level languages in performance while remaining easy to write and maintain. JavaScript has been the most popular programming language for nearly a decade.
Just no man.
Yes, JavaScript has been the most popular language but it is exclusively because of the front-end. Many companies do not want to pay for separate back-end devs and ask their front-end devs to do it instead. These people (ab)use JS because they're most comfortable with it and are under crunch; so we end up with the abomination that is back-end JS.
It is NOT rivaling much lower-level languages; it can't even rival C#.
First off, it is interpreted. You are never going to be faster than competently written C, C++, Go, nor Rust. Secondly, the resources it takes to exist makes in a non-option for embedded machines - which Social-Security facilities are all but guaranteed to use.
Not to mention the horrendous (and insecure) package infrastructure, and under-powered core libraries - it would be the fullest extent disaster.
The saddest part? The larpers at DOG(shit)E are all but guaranteed to pick the worst tools for the job, over-engineer, and have extremely poor management. Meaning whatever they ship WILL collaspe the system day 1; and all of the people refusing to pay attention will be like "hOw CouLd THis HaPPen"
I was only responding to the idea that no one should ever use NodeJS, as it's good as a web server.
A Honda Civic is a great car for what it's built for and people know how to drive it. But I wouldn't use it to haul gravel or drive the Indy 500.
This is like a new programmer coming in to their new job, seeing the code isn't perfect and saying they could rebuild the entire thing and do it better in a month.
It's not a case of "seeing the code isn't perfect" but rather, not understanding the myriad problems the code is solving or mitigating.
I'm reminded of this shitshow:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Queensland_Health_payroll_system_implementation
Queensland is a state of about 3m people in Australia. Their health service employs about 100k people. They ended up spending about 900m USD to develop their payroll software and fix the fuck ups it caused.
I'm an accountant by trade, there's a classic "techbro does accounting" style of development we see a lot. Like if you hadn't spent a career learning how complex accounting can be, it would be easy to look at a payroll system and conclude "it's just a database with some rules".
They're really playing with fire here.
So many MAGA supporters are seniors who are entirely dependent on OASDI. If Trump's minions break this, we're going to see torches and pitchforks strapped to electric scooters and golf carts coming out of Florida retirement communities in droves.
No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.
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