8 ms·

Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date and never get wedged into a nearly impossible situation of having to rewrite 60 year old code (which

by mbell 8y ago

Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date and never get wedged into a nearly impossible situation of having to rewrite 60 year old code (which likely has nothing resembling a test suite nor even a spare piece of compatible hardware to test on).

cpburns2009 8y ago
Small development teams have a hard enough time with that. I can't imagine that is even remotely possible within the bureaucratic framework of a government agency.
eberkund 8y ago
This. A common answer to criticism of systems in need of replacing is that it is simply too big, too complex and depends on too many old legacy components to make any large changes to. The real solution is not to get into these scenarios in the first place by not doing any kind of maintenance work for decades.
mysterydip 8y ago
The people in the trenches most likely prefer that (I know I did). The problem is convincing the people higher up to spend part of a tight budget (money and manhours) every year without an easily-defined return.
reaperducer 8y ago
> Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date Easy to say as a grunt, but businesses (and governments) are run by managers and accountants. What you describe is upgrading for upgrading's sake. If a system isn't broken, there's no point or financial reason to replace it. Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not. Plus, you're dealing with people's money. You don't fuck around with people's money. It would be easier to merge Facebook and Google's databases.
- s2g 8y ago
  Imagine if you were an airline that didn't bother to maintain planes. When you build software you should plan to maintain it. Bug fixes, features, upgrades, etc...
  - nobleach 8y ago
    Imagine if you were an airline that payed your mechanics absolute bottom dollars and gave them incredibly silly restrictions based on fears of non-tech people. Imagine if you made them sit in countless meetings while people with more years with the airline made decisions that the mechanics KNEW were wrong. That's how the government does IT.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    >I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. A better analogy would be if you were an airline and kept upgrading airplanes before they were needed. Airplanes (especially private ones) fly for decades and decades. No one is suggesting that the IRS systems weren't maintained. Obviously they were since they exist on virtualized hardware.
    - lostapathy 8y ago
      Airplanes get upgraded all the time - fresh seats, newer gps tech, etc. Software systems like this get “mainenance” of the bare minimum sense - think a new battery after the original is dead.
      - pbourke 8y ago
        Exactly. The government also ensures that if an issue is found with a airplane The Shit Hits the Fan and multiple parties are heavily incentivized to fix it. We need a similar approach to critical IT infrastructure.
- mbell 8y ago
  > Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. There were about 150M individual tax returns and ~5.8M corporate returns in 2015. Even if we assume 50 years of storage in the 'active' dataset that is < 8B returns. Also, most returns don't contain a particularly large amount of data in them. Pretty sure we're talking about an in-memory scale dataset here, certainly for the active set in any given year. It actually would not surprise me if we (current co) ingest more data in a week than the entirety of the US tax return history. > And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not. I might believe that is an issue if the IRS actually calculated everyones taxes for them and sent out a 'do you agree' form, but they don't. It's more like they randomly sample some returns based on some hand picked 'warning' flags and have someone manually check them, maybe with the help of some excel formulae.
acdha 8y ago
Most people would like that but think about how that sounds from a budget perspective: a bunch of pricey employees for something which seems to already be working fine, with a constant stream of political grandstanding lies about waste and overpaid staff. Most big organizations have trouble funding maintenance & operations versus new features and the government is especially subject to that because there are so many outside voices who benefit from criticism and have no vested interest in success. The .gov pay scale has not kept pace with either inflation or IT wages and the benefits have been cut by Congress at various points so that’s less of a balance than it used to be. The GS-15 position mentioned in the IRS staffing article is the top of the non-executive scale and technical positions tend to be rare and specialized; managers are overseeing a fair amount of staff and budget. In DC, that starts at $134k and tops at $164k - not bad but DC isn’t a cheap place to live either: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2018/DCB.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
- s2g 8y ago
  It sounds like literally any other piece of equipment you buy.
  - acdha 8y ago
    Yes, and there are plenty of examples of people asking for maintenance funding, being told to wait for a better budget year, and eventually having to pay considerably more when something blows up. Software is especially prone to this as many people think of it as a project with a defined end date rather than an ongoing endeavor.
Tempest1981 8y ago
Is the 60-year old assembly code updated as the tax laws change? I guess it must be. Before embarking on a re-write, how about we create a simplified tax code (laws)? Not sure which task is tougher.

by mbell 8y ago

cpburns2009 8y ago

Small development teams have a hard enough time with that. I can't imagine that is even remotely possible within the bureaucratic framework of a government agency.

eberkund 8y ago

This. A common answer to criticism of systems in need of replacing is that it is simply too big, too complex and depends on too many old legacy components to make any large changes to. The real solution is not to get into these scenarios in the first place by not doing any kind of maintenance work for decades.

mysterydip 8y ago

The people in the trenches most likely prefer that (I know I did). The problem is convincing the people higher up to spend part of a tight budget (money and manhours) every year without an easily-defined return.

reaperducer 8y ago

> Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date Easy to say as a grunt, but businesses (and governments) are run by managers and accountants. What you describe is upgrading for upgrading's sake. If a system isn't broken, there's no point or financial reason to replace it. Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not. Plus, you're dealing with people's money. You don't fuck around with people's money. It would be easier to merge Facebook and Google's databases.

s2g 8y ago
Imagine if you were an airline that didn't bother to maintain planes. When you build software you should plan to maintain it. Bug fixes, features, upgrades, etc...
- nobleach 8y ago
  Imagine if you were an airline that payed your mechanics absolute bottom dollars and gave them incredibly silly restrictions based on fears of non-tech people. Imagine if you made them sit in countless meetings while people with more years with the airline made decisions that the mechanics KNEW were wrong. That's how the government does IT.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  >I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. A better analogy would be if you were an airline and kept upgrading airplanes before they were needed. Airplanes (especially private ones) fly for decades and decades. No one is suggesting that the IRS systems weren't maintained. Obviously they were since they exist on virtualized hardware.
  - lostapathy 8y ago
    Airplanes get upgraded all the time - fresh seats, newer gps tech, etc. Software systems like this get “mainenance” of the bare minimum sense - think a new battery after the original is dead.
    - pbourke 8y ago
      Exactly. The government also ensures that if an issue is found with a airplane The Shit Hits the Fan and multiple parties are heavily incentivized to fix it. We need a similar approach to critical IT infrastructure.
mbell 8y ago
> Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. There were about 150M individual tax returns and ~5.8M corporate returns in 2015. Even if we assume 50 years of storage in the 'active' dataset that is < 8B returns. Also, most returns don't contain a particularly large amount of data in them. Pretty sure we're talking about an in-memory scale dataset here, certainly for the active set in any given year. It actually would not surprise me if we (current co) ingest more data in a week than the entirety of the US tax return history. > And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not. I might believe that is an issue if the IRS actually calculated everyones taxes for them and sent out a 'do you agree' form, but they don't. It's more like they randomly sample some returns based on some hand picked 'warning' flags and have someone manually check them, maybe with the help of some excel formulae.

acdha 8y ago

Most people would like that but think about how that sounds from a budget perspective: a bunch of pricey employees for something which seems to already be working fine, with a constant stream of political grandstanding lies about waste and overpaid staff. Most big organizations have trouble funding maintenance & operations versus new features and the government is especially subject to that because there are so many outside voices who benefit from criticism and have no vested interest in success. The .gov pay scale has not kept pace with either inflation or IT wages and the benefits have been cut by Congress at various points so that’s less of a balance than it used to be. The GS-15 position mentioned in the IRS staffing article is the top of the non-executive scale and technical positions tend to be rare and specialized; managers are overseeing a fair amount of staff and budget. In DC, that starts at $134k and tops at $164k - not bad but DC isn’t a cheap place to live either: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2018/DCB.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

s2g 8y ago
It sounds like literally any other piece of equipment you buy.
- acdha 8y ago
  Yes, and there are plenty of examples of people asking for maintenance funding, being told to wait for a better budget year, and eventually having to pay considerably more when something blows up. Software is especially prone to this as many people think of it as a project with a defined end date rather than an ongoing endeavor.

Tempest1981 8y ago

Is the 60-year old assembly code updated as the tax laws change? I guess it must be. Before embarking on a re-write, how about we create a simplified tax code (laws)? Not sure which task is tougher.