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The IRS already nearly developed a system to automatically translate their mainframe assembler logic into Java and check its correctness, but the main developer
by Lionsion 9y ago
The IRS already nearly developed a system to automatically translate their mainframe assembler logic into Java and check its correctness, but the main developer was hired on some special kind of program (to bypass the government salary structure) which could not be renewed before the project was completed.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377329 (The IRS’s Effort to Convert Its Assembly Codebase to Java)
https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/irs-clutches-its-modernization-holy-grail/ https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2018/01/ir...:
> Now, IRS is on the verge of solving this problem. The solution was engineered by a group of about eight people. And not under a multi-hundred-million-dollar systems integration contract. A leader of the group was Jian Wang, a Chinese emigre who is now a naturalized citizen. Wang told me his solution isn’t a silver bullet but rather a carefully worked-out methodology. It has three components so potentially powerful the IRS has filed patent applications for them.
> I say “was” because he’s left the agency, and the status of the project is dark.
> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
> “The last one ran out this past summer,” Koskinen said. The departures included Wang. He says he applied to become a GS-15 or Senior Executive Service member so he could see through the assembler-to-Java project. But his approval didn’t come through until a week before his employment authority expired. By then he’d accepted another job. Wang says he had a house to pay for, kids to educate. Koskinen confirms the agency wanted to convert Wang. But the process of approval from Treasury headquarters and the Office of Personnel Management simply took too long.
- RhodesianHunter 9y agoWe can't have a government agency go and be efficient now. That would break decades of "everything should be privatized because government can't do it well" brainwashing. Doubly so for the IRS.
- Lionsion 9y ago> RhodesianHunter 24 minutes ago | parent | on: The IRS Really Needs Some New Computers Rhodesian as in this Rhodesia? Rhodesia’s Dead — but White Supremacists Have Given It New Life Online https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/magazine/rhodesia-zimbabwe-white-supremacists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/magazine/rhodesia-zimbabw...
- alaxsxaq 9y agoMore likely as in Rhodesian Ridgeback hunting dogs.
- pavpanchekha 9y agoTo explain the "special kind of program" further, the US government has a very strict salary ladder (the "General Schedule" and similar), necessary to keep the enormous federal workforce paid fairly and without corruption. However, the salary ladder has not kept up with the explosion of incomes for very specialized professionals. For example, the scheduled salaries generally lie below the $400k salary for the president; top engineers sometimes earn more than that, and top engineering managers often do. This makes it hard to hire those professionals. The special kind of program here is a special allowance from Congress to hire people at salaries larger than the general schedule allows; Congress gives this right to some agencies for a limited time when it perceives a need (and politics allow). For another example, Congress gave the FDA the right to do this last year to allow it to hire more drug reviewers (a job pharma companies are willing to pay a lot for). In this case, Congress allowed the program to run out too soon (perhaps due to budget negotiation issues, perhaps due to oversight). Often that leads to people leaving and a lot of social and organizational capital drying up, just like it did here.
- madengr 9y agoHa ha, “generally lie below $400k”. Usually way below 400k.
- sailfast 9y agoThe maximum pay rate for a GS-15 (top civilian grade) in the DC area is around $158K. Special hiring authorities are great ways for government to get what they need in a hurry, but can be abused, and should (in my opinion) only be used to experiment (read: test hypotheses) about hiring in the federal government, rather than as a band-aid fix.
- corpMaverick 9y agoPerhaps these problems that require out of the box thinking should be approached like the DARPA self driving car challenge. Set up the problem and winning criteria and give a 10 million USD price and contract to whoever solves it the best. Might be better to have 10 teams of 10 people trying different approaches than one team of 100.
- Someone1234 9y agoThat's a cute idea, but building accurate enough requirements to complete the task is actually part of the core problem. This team bypassed that bottleneck by ignoring requirements, re-building the application(s) 1:1, and then using testing to prove that they reproduced the same result(s) for the same input(s). In order to set up the competition you're suggestion the department would need to have documentation which they lack, which also happens to be the whole crux of the issue.
- nn3 9y agoFrankly, if such a important project depended so much on a single person it was already in serious trouble. The other 7 people in the project are unable to finish the code on their own? Hard to believe. Likely that article was overblown.
- exotree 9y agoCurrently we have five people on our team. If our team lead left, we'd be in a big spot of trouble. He has the social cachet and the technical chops to lead a project, while also being a pretty decent motivator when bureaucracy gets tough. Losing that person would be a blow. I imagine it's much the same situation here.