LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL
I dont even program and i could’ve told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol “durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11”
Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn’t. Don’t dis teen coders.
I don’t know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc…
There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.
You wouldn’t say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven’t had the time to get to greybeard level yet
this is why, if they heavily modified the code in such a short time and they couldn’t understand it: it proves there was a previous data breach and they’re just installing the pre-written patches… the smoking gun that i can’t explain to anyone
How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?
I studied COBOL a bit in college and it’s not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason …
The issue isn’t inherently age it’s just time and experience, understanding different coding patterns and paradigms that have changed over the years etc. Even someone who’s been coding every day from ages 14-20 can’t have the same knowledge and experience as someone who’s been working with software since the 90s or earlier. Granted, there will always be brilliant people who even when lacking experience are more talented and skillful than maybe the majority, but that is uncommon. I’m only in my late 20s. And I remember in college there was a huge diversity of skills, from “are you sure this career path is really a good idea for you?” To “holy hell how did you do all of that in one hackathon?” But even for those really smart folks, they aren’t just going to inherently understand all the different ways to organize and structure code, all the conventions that exist, and more importantly why those methods and structures exist and the history that informed them. I’m not saying you need on the ground experience (although, I’d say many people do, as many people can’t really internalize things without direct exposure), but there’s just not enough time, literally, in the handful of years that is childhood and teenage years to absorb all that history.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, yes, I agree that the problem isn’t inherently about being teenagers but I do think it’s a valid criticism that it’s kind of ridiculous to have such young folks leading this kind of project given it’s literally impossible for them to have the same amount of experience as software vets. It’s also valid that young people are capable of seeing things in very new ways, since they aren’t weighed down by al that history. But that’s why diversity is useful especially for such a monumental project as this.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.
This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven’t actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.
What’s specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:
- They’re very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards “cool” stuff, which COBOL hasn’t been for 4 decades.
- They haven’t been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.
I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.
The whole “COBOL’s default date is 1875” thing is just a lie. COBOL doesn’t even have a date type.
So the problem doesn’t have anything to do with COBOL, someone just made it up
The way I’m reading is that they were holding a date related value in an unsigned integer field, so the start date (corresponding to 0) was a convention (whether internal or broader than that, I don’t know) and they chose 0, the default initialization value for such fields as a flag for “no information”. Back in the day there wasn’t all that memory and storage to go around so I bet this was a 1 byte field holding a year value.
Those choices in a system to be used for Social Security for a whole nation make sense in software design terms if you’re having to come up with your own solution for storing dates in as fewer bytes as possible in a language with no built-in date type, but present day teenagers would have never have been in such a situation because there are no currently fashionable programming languages without date types, space isn’t as constrained anymore and they don’t have experience in the kind of projects were one has to store records for hundreds of millions of people.
my brother taught me to code when i was 6, so at 19 i had 13 years of experience already. At 6 i was mostly doing simple stuff like qbasic, vb6, but still it adds up. I’m not saying I’m a great coder, not by a long shot, just that I was experienced as a teenager. I assume a lot of these teenagers are much better than i was.
I taught myself coding at 14 on a ZX Spectrum 128 and was doing Assembly within 2 years.
By now I have over 3 decades professional software engineering experience, almost 4 decades in total if including the stuff I did non-professionally.
Looking back, I knew how to make programs (even made a Minesweeper for the Spectrum in Assembly) but that’s not at all the same as knowing the good or industry standard practices in the languages I used.
Whilst it should be way easier now to find those things out (there was no Internet back when I started), in my experience one needs to actually have been coding in a spaghetti way long enough and in enough projects you can’t just ditch if they get too messy to actually feel the need to learn those better ways and hence go search for it.
Also I bet that it’s a lot harder to find advanced tutorials on COBOL on the net from people with actual experience doing it professionally for a couple of years than it is for, say, Python.
In before Musk says “You think the government uses COBOL?!”
I don’t think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.
Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL…
So do many older private companies.
Like banks. Account balances, transactions.
Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.
Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider ‘modernity’ is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.
We’re gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and … there just isn’t anyone who actually knows how to do it.
My understanding is that even if you learn COBOL, you’d struggle to understand legacy systems since they have their quirks from a bygone era
That is absolutely true as well… though this may be just a personal anecdote, it seems to me that the few COBOL coders I once knew would be amongst the most likely to keep a solid documentation of their own systems.
The problem with that though, is that their bosses are almost always too stupid to ask them for such documentation before they leave/retire, or to bother to preserve it when the exiting COBOL programmer gives it to them, because coding is magic to them, and you’re either a good magician that can do the thing, or you’re not.
Upper management / C Suite seems to never understand why the term software engineer was/is used.
Yeah, I’ve been tempted to try this route, but you’re really pigeonholing yourself. Even if there’s always wrk, I can’t imagine only working with cobol the rest of my career.
Even worse, the places still using this are very heavy in process, with many undocumented dependencies among many undocumented workflows and business processes. Modernizing COBOL is not a coding problem: it’s a mammoth project management, coordination, and paperwork project that also has a little bit of coding. And its not like you can write clean code, you need to write essentially the same tangled mess of accumulated changes over decades because there’s no way of knowing everything that might break
I hereby nominate you to be the new head of the SSA.
You get it, exactly.
COBOL itself is a fairly minor part of the problem, the real problem is the retiring COBOL coders are the only ones with enough institutional knowledge, broad and specific, to keep the engine from grenading and fucking wheels from coming off the car when it hits a bad enough pothole.
But management and C Suite are apparently homo superior, fully confident that none of that really matters, they’ll just keep throwing money at it until its fixed, and failing that, laying off everyone, who care in the end, they get a golden parachute when it all burns, everyone else can FOAD.
The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
Found the link to the SSA page describing the policy which took effect in 2015.
115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier
I can’t wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.
