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 Unhealthy Software program for the Federal Authorities.”
The final concept is that the incentives to jot down good software program aren’t almost as sturdy as these nudging you to jot down it poorly. First, the tasks are normally enormous and carried out on a “value plus” foundation. That’s, an organization estimates how a lot the undertaking will value, and submits a bid based mostly on that value plus a revenue margin. The concept is that competing corporations will work to get their improvement prices down and reduce their earnings to develop into the bottom bidder.
Now, the bottom bid doesn’t all the time win, however usually it does. So the inducement is robust to bid as little as one can dare.
Usually, then, the successful bidder will get to work, and so they quickly notice that they gained’t probably be worthwhile within the endeavor except they construct rapidly, minimize corners, and usually do the minimal work required to fulfill the specification, usually 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 carried out isn’t superb. So the federal government sighs to itself and places out one other bid to get every little thing working.
Effectively, who’s finest 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 hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in authorities contracts for writing dangerous software program and by no means delivering good, working code.
It’s far more complicated than that, and the federal government does get techniques working. However the underlying incentives usually are not designed to provide environment friendly and efficient outcomes. The revenue motive drives dangerous work, not wonderful work.
Within the protection of those contractors, authorities techniques are sometimes enormous and sophisticated and have necessities paperwork hundreds of pages lengthy.
So once I heard that Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are going to rewrite the COBOL-based system that runs Social Safety in just a few months, I simply shook my head and gave a wry chuckle. Positive they’re.
The most important pile
Let’s begin with the notion of rewriting a working system. Positive, it’s in all probability a enormous 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 data of a long time of improvement and necessities of the system, and rewriting it to comprise all of that inscrutable, unknowable company data is, to place it delicately—fairly insane.
I gained’t contact the political aspect of this complete factor (not with a 15-foot pole) however I’ll fearlessly assert this: The DOGE crew members don’t have even the slightest concept what the necessities are for the US Social Safety software program system. They don’t have the slightest concept what they don’t know. A lot of that data is embedded within the code and simply runs—sending out checks, processing functions, and usually protecting issues working. 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 assume they might take an present working system that appears like a 200-car practice wreck filled with kitchen home equipment and switch it right into a Japanese bullet practice. However the business has recognized for many years that rewriting a system from scratch isn’t the suitable resolution. Asking a crew to rewrite what may be the one most complicated and vital system in the whole nation appears the very definition of fraught with peril.
So no, they gained’t rewrite Social Safety in just a few months. They’ll spend just a few months studying why the final 40 years occurred the way in which 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 filled with kitchen home equipment off the rails.
