Authorities software program growth is a curious enterprise.
After I was a pupil on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty, I wrote a paper known 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 put in writing good software program aren’t practically as robust as these nudging you to put in writing it poorly. First, the tasks are normally big and carried out on a “value plus” foundation. That’s, an organization estimates how a lot the mission will value, and submits a bid based mostly on that value plus a revenue margin. The thought is that competing corporations will work to get their growth prices down and decrease their income to grow to be the bottom bidder.
Now, the bottom bid doesn’t at all times win, however typically it does. So the motivation is powerful to bid as little as one can dare.
Sometimes, then, the profitable bidder will get to work, they usually quickly notice that they gained’t probably be worthwhile within the endeavor except they construct rapidly, lower corners, and customarily 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 mission isn’t completed and what’s carried out isn’t excellent. So the federal government sighs to itself and places out one other bid to get every part working.
Nicely, who’s greatest suited to “repair” the mission? Naturally, the corporate that constructed it! So they’re fairly often awarded a further contract to “right” the issues of the primary effort, and so it goes.
Thus, software program growth 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 programs working. However the underlying incentives usually are not designed to provide environment friendly and efficient outcomes. The revenue motive drives dangerous work, not glorious work.
Within the protection of those contractors, authorities programs are sometimes big and complicated 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. Positive they’re.
The largest pile
Let’s begin with the notion of rewriting a working system. Positive, it’s in all probability a big 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 information of a long time of growth and necessities of the system, and rewriting it to comprise all of that inscrutable, unknowable company information is, to place it delicately—fairly insane.
I gained’t contact the political facet of this complete 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 information is embedded within the code and simply runs—sending out checks, processing functions, and customarily protecting 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 prepare wreck stuffed with kitchen home equipment and switch it right into a Japanese bullet prepare. However the trade has identified for many years that rewriting a system from scratch isn’t the fitting resolution. Asking a workforce to rewrite what is likely to be the only most advanced and necessary 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 prepare 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 once you run a 200-car prepare stuffed with kitchen home equipment off the rails.
