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 Dangerous 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 initiatives are often enormous and performed 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 thought is that competing firms will work to get their improvement prices down and decrease their earnings to grow to be the bottom bidder.
Now, the bottom bid doesn’t all the time win, however typically it does. So the inducement is robust to bid as little as one can dare.
Usually, then, the profitable bidder will get to work, and so they quickly understand that they received’t probably be worthwhile within the endeavor except they construct shortly, minimize corners, and usually do the minimal work required to satisfy 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 performed isn’t superb. So the federal government sighs to itself and places out one other bid to get all the pieces working.
Properly, who’s finest suited to “repair” the undertaking? Naturally, the corporate that constructed it! So they’re fairly often awarded a further 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 dangerous 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 dangerous work, not glorious work.
Within the protection of those contractors, authorities techniques are sometimes enormous and complicated and have necessities paperwork 1000’s of pages lengthy.
So after I heard that Elon Musk and his DOGE crew are going to rewrite the COBOL-based system that runs Social Safety in a couple of 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 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 complete factor (not with a 15-foot pole) however I’ll fearlessly assert this: The DOGE crew 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 preserving 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 assume they might take an current 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 trade has recognized for many years that rewriting a system from scratch is rarely the suitable answer. Asking a crew to rewrite what may be the one most advanced and essential system in your entire nation appears the very definition of fraught with peril.
So no, they received’t rewrite Social Safety in a couple of months. They’ll spend a couple 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 seek out out what occurs whenever you run a 200-car practice filled with kitchen home equipment off the rails.
