Authorities software program improvement is a curious enterprise.
Once I was a scholar on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty, 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 overall thought is that the incentives to write down good software program aren’t almost as sturdy as these nudging you to write down it poorly. First, the tasks are normally enormous and executed on a “value plus” foundation. That’s, an organization estimates how a lot the venture 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 decrease their income to change into 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.
Sometimes, then, the successful bidder will get to work, they usually quickly understand that they received’t presumably be worthwhile within the endeavor except they construct shortly, reduce 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 venture isn’t completed and what’s executed isn’t excellent. So the federal government sighs to itself and places out one other bid to get every thing working.
Properly, who’s finest suited to “repair” the venture? 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 thousands and thousands of {dollars} in authorities contracts for writing unhealthy software program and by no means delivering good, working code.
It’s far more complicated than that, and the federal government does get programs working. However the underlying incentives will not be designed to provide environment friendly and efficient outcomes. The revenue motive drives unhealthy work, not wonderful work.
Within the protection of those contractors, authorities programs are sometimes enormous and sophisticated and have necessities paperwork 1000’s of pages lengthy.
So after I heard that Elon Musk and his DOGE workforce 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. Certain they’re.
The largest pile
Let’s begin with the notion of rewriting a working system. Certain, it’s most likely 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 the entire data of many years 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 received’t contact the political facet of this entire 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 data is embedded within the code and simply runs—sending out checks, processing purposes, and usually holding issues operating. How anybody goes to learn all of that COBOL code, perceive it, and translate it right into a Python software (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 business has identified for many years that rewriting a system from scratch is rarely the appropriate answer. Asking a workforce 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 received’t rewrite Social Safety in just a few months. They’ll spend just a few 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.