I’ve been a programmer for around 20 years now and I can tell you with 100% confidence that this is going to be an absolute fucking disaster. I’ve built project features—not even full projects—that took months. Hell, we launch one on Monday. This would realistically take years, and after seeing how garbage the DOGE site was built, I have zero confidence in the incel team Elon scraped off his Steam friends list.

I vaguely remember the same story when he bought twitter and got called out by a senior dev for not understanding shit. History repeating itself speedrun any%?

If they are genuinely stating months as a realistic timeframe then they either know nothing or are fully aware and this is a deliberate killshot.

The black market for social security data is gonna have a field day.

Someone at work was saying people should download their work records from the ssa web portal before they mess it up/lose it.

How much you want to bet they are going to feed the code base into ai and ask it to re-write it in a different language?

even ChatGPT agrees this is stupid:

As if "accidentally" breaking it during this process would be a bug, not a feature.

"Oh no, we completely broke the SSA, it's all gone. Soorrrrrryyyyyy"

Oh fuck this.... I can't even look at my own code from a year or two ago and understand what the hell I was doing.

I learned some very basic COBOL back in high school (using punch cards), and that shit was confusing as hell.
There is no possible way that this ancient codebase could be migrated by a bunch of 20 year olds in such a short amount of time.

As someone who's actually been part of a team that did this exact migration, it's gonna be shitshow with tons of bugs when the mainframes are decommissioned and the new system goes live.

It's not the wrong move cause the tech is increasingly obsolete but the level of effort will be underestimated.

First you break government. Once broken, privatize everything on the justification of government not working.

Use propaganda to make people hateful and violent towards election workers. Use to loss of election workers to either have the incumbent administration run elections with "impartiality" or cancel elections altogether.

Cut government funding and make everything unpredictable, causing farmers and business owners to go bankrupt. Have oligarchs buy up everything at rock-bottom pricing, and turn the citizens back into serfs, who will be poor enough to shut up and do as they're told.

I'm convinced this is a genuine attempt at geriatricide and to weed out the weak. If I'm not mistaken, this is something that he and his friends are fond of.

It took the GIMP team 7 years to harden and release 3.0 and it's a fucking image editing program, this guy is actually insane.

Isn’t a benefit to these systems still being COBOL is that they’re hard to hack?

They are using this as cover to say, oops we don't know how much you paid into the plan, so therefore we will give all money to Elon and Wallstreet instead of paying benefits. I hope this is what finally get people to throw this clown out of government.

Excuse me, they said they want to have this done in months? Did I read that article correctly?

There are actually companies (very few) that work with migrating large cobol code bases to java, in a automated manner. And it costs a lot, hundreds of millions and it takes a couple of years. They ensure that the cobol and java execution is doing the same thing. So it works, but it's shit. Many do this because it's hard to find cobol developers and the cost of IBM mainframes.

Anyways the code turns into cobol style in Java, horrible and hard work with, would never like to maintain it.

His gremlins can't chatgpt their way through the code so he wants it migrated so he can fuck with it or steal money, probably both.

I feel like there are a good six very large companies that could give firsthand accounts on why letting Elon Musk touch an important piece of software is a terrible idea.

He’ll kill a lot more than just two birds.

What the fuck is the rush!? They should do this, but there is zero reason to rush it unless you want people to suffer needlessly.

Whatever language is chosen will be regarded forever as worse than COBOL, regardless of its actual merits.

That's how you know they have nobody with experience there that has their opinion being considered. No one with actual experience in the industry wouldn't do this out of the blue and in a few months "for sure, no delays".

My only thought here is that they have no idea how to scope things properly. Anyone who has done rewrites or large ETLs of systems knows that initial scoping is always usually wrong. -- my bet is they drag this out for the rest of the presidency where "done in months" is actually "we're still working on it". And maybe even after so Musk can suckle another government test.

it's a sick world where matthew perry isn't with us but elon still is.

Busy few months coming up for Grok

Im gonna side with Elon here, in the fact COBOL is absolutely outdated and should be phased out. However, considering what they said in the post and how it went with his takeover of Twitter, I have doubts that he will be capable of executing it correctly. Move fast and break things simply shouldn't apply in the government sphere.