Authorities software program improvement is a curious enterprise.
After I was a pupil on the Naval Postgraduate College, I wrote a paper referred to as “There’s a Lot of Cash to be Made Writing Dangerous Software program for the Federal Authorities.”
The final thought is that the incentives to put in writing good software program aren’t practically as robust as these nudging you to put in writing it poorly. First, the initiatives are often big and executed on a “price plus” foundation. That’s, an organization estimates how a lot the undertaking will price, and submits a bid based mostly on that price plus a revenue margin. The thought is that competing corporations will work to get their improvement prices down and decrease their earnings to turn out to be the bottom bidder.
Now, the bottom bid doesn’t all the time win, however usually it does. So the motivation is powerful to bid as little as one can dare.
Usually, then, the successful bidder will get to work, they usually quickly notice that they received’t presumably be worthwhile within the endeavor except they construct shortly, minimize corners, and usually do the minimal work required to fulfill the specification, typically with sub-sub-optimal outcomes.
Ineptness rewarded
Guess what occurs subsequent? When the supply day arrives, everyone seems to be shocked when the undertaking isn’t completed and what’s executed isn’t superb. So the federal government sighs to itself and places out one other bid to get all the things working.
Effectively, who’s greatest suited to “repair” the undertaking? Naturally, the corporate that constructed it! So they’re fairly often awarded an extra contract to “appropriate” the issues of the primary effort, and so it goes.
Thus, software program improvement organizations can win tens of millions of {dollars} in authorities contracts for writing unhealthy software program and by no means delivering good, working code.
It’s far more advanced than that, and the federal government does get techniques working. However the underlying incentives are usually not designed to supply environment friendly and efficient outcomes. The revenue motive drives unhealthy work, not glorious work.
Within the protection of those contractors, authorities techniques are sometimes big and complicated and have necessities paperwork hundreds of pages lengthy.
So once I heard that Elon Musk and his DOGE workforce are going to rewrite the COBOL-based system that runs Social Safety in a number of months, I simply shook my head and gave a wry chuckle. Positive they’re.
The largest pile
Let’s begin with the notion of rewriting a working system. Positive, it’s in all probability a big pile of mud, among the many hugest of piles of mud. However it’s, roughly, working. And the knowledge of taking a working system, which has embedded inside it all the information of many years of improvement and necessities of the system, and rewriting it to comprise all of that inscrutable, unknowable company information is, to place it delicately—fairly insane.
I received’t contact the political facet of this complete factor (not with a 15-foot pole) however I’ll fearlessly assert this: The DOGE workforce members don’t have even the slightest thought what the necessities are for the US Social Safety software program system. They don’t have the slightest thought what they don’t know. A lot of that information is embedded within the code and simply runs—sending out checks, processing purposes, and usually conserving issues operating. How anybody goes to learn all of that COBOL code, perceive it, and translate it right into a Python utility (or no matter) is past me.
Look, I get it. I’ve by no means met a software program developer who didn’t suppose they might take an present working system that appears like a 200-car practice wreck stuffed with kitchen home equipment and switch it right into a Japanese bullet practice. However the trade has identified for many years that rewriting a system from scratch is rarely the precise resolution. Asking a workforce to rewrite what could be the only most advanced and necessary system in the complete nation appears the very definition of fraught with peril.
So no, they received’t rewrite Social Safety in a number of months. They’ll spend a number of months studying why the final 40 years occurred the best way they did—in the event that they’re fortunate. And if this practice does begin rolling—and let me say very clearly that it ought to unquestionably stay within the station—we’re all going to search out out what occurs while you run a 200-car practice stuffed with kitchen home equipment off the rails.
