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A bunch of armchair developers seem to have been summoned to tell the Federal government how to handle form submissions for an extremely security and privacy in
by dubcanada 7y ago
A bunch of armchair developers seem to have been summoned to tell the Federal government how to handle form submissions for an extremely security and privacy intense application using their fancy modern techniques.
You are talking about comparing a basic web form with an application for unemployment benefits which must go into a federal tax database and be processed using a what I assume is a garbage mainframe system.
It not only needs to be validated, it needs to securely store records, be able to compare them, and hook up to the system that handles payments, etc.
They can't just circumvent it and dump it into some silly Amazon or MySQL database and call it a day. That would require the employees to basically copy and paste that data into the actual warehouse and considering they have 3+ million to go through as it is making it easy for them to process is just as important as allowing people to submit.
For the time being the correct response is a queue gate.
Stop being silly.
- Demiurge 7y agoI also completely agree with this sentiment. A gov't form could be an unsightly complex beast that can't be re-architected, sometimes, ever.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vsareto 7y agoThey could, they just don't want to pay for it. The government has no interest in being known for easily handling a huge spike of traffic during a crisis. They can just take the lower road and get by with less and saying 'try again later'. There's no repercussions here because it's the government. Hence mainframe maintainers should really move to charging $1 million/year in a decade or two.
- seph-reed 7y agoSo, legitimately, how to we make it so the government does have repercussions? I see a lot of people making jokes about guillotines and nooses, but is there no better way?
- Demiurge 7y agoI suggest by campaigning to bring logic and critical thinking into early childhood education. Then philosophy, the classics. Science education. Once you have more people who can understand that there are scientific and moral issues with manifest destiny, and religion isn't going to solve global warming, there will be some shifts in the public discourse and public policies.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoHaving the schools teach RightThink instead of WrongThink tends to be a hard sell to an ideologically diverse nation.
- Demiurge 7y agoThe whole point of logic and philosophy is that it teaches to think and analyze for yourself, Think, not SomeThink.
- champagneben 7y agoWhat's the scientific issue with manifest destiny?
- Demiurge 7y agoIt's the creation of pseudo-scientific explanations for coincidental advantages Europeans had, that created extreme intellectual complacency and bias that is holding back progress.
- kazagistar 7y agoThey aren't choosing to have crap infrastructure, their infrastructure is intentionally defunded as part of a political campaign to engender distrust in government functions and increase privatization. Government is incompetent because if it is, its easy to justify selling off the country to the incredibly wealthy so they can get wealthier.
- Demiurge 7y agoIt's a bit worse than that. The infrastructure isn't actually defunded, there are huge funds allocated to projects, but they're being consumed by managers at Deloitte, Lockheed, Booz Allen, Accenture, etc. The times when we see success is when enough funding trickled down to the few engineers who could make it work with what they get. Other times we see success is when there is enough public oversight by sufficiently independent stake holders. I see this in many local government agencies that are small, and projects accountable to city council, and so on.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 7y agoIt's "armchair" to say "you get what you deserve if your entire system depends on garbage"? ...okay, whatever you say.
- dubcanada 7y agoI called it garbage, but really neither of us know.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoUnemployment benefits are handled by the states, not by the federal government.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoIn Canada, it isn't. The parent's username suggests they talkin about the CAN. https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei.html https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei.html In the US, though, it's by-state.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoGP was talking about GGP's suggestion, which was about a US state (Michigan).
- devonkim 7y agoYep, USDS and 18F folks would have to agree with you here. The arcane crap that we have to deal with in payment and government information systems is beyond frustrating and makes it extremely tough. I read an article about having to fix a multi-decade Cisco router bug to get CI/CD and automated deployments working after USDS / 18F started setting up faster deployments but still needed to figure out how to deal with legacy stateful DB connections. The reality of government paperwork systems on the backend is much, much closer to this hell and is part of why so many like myself ran screaming from public sector because when you see so many peers doing so well at FAANGS, why would you subject yourself to something that resists change and wants to keep it the same way? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2014/03/24/a-sinkhole-of-federal-bureaucracy-in-pennsylvania/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2014/03/2...
- x0x0 7y agoThe point is that backend pain shouldn't stop you from accepting it on the front end and putting it into a queue. Making the problem of getting the application through backend systems the states' to deal with, not the applicants'.
- thrwn_frthr_awy 7y agoSo are you applying for the 44k/yr job to fix it? No, most of are not.
- yellowapple 7y agoI recall that looking like a fortune last time I was laid off. I would've applied for that in a heartbeat. Now, not so much, but if my circumstances change, then who knows?
- kbenson 7y agoYeah, even in the SF/SJ locality which has the highest Locality Pay Adjustment (at 41.44%)[1], the position would likely have to be GS-12/GS/13 to start being competitive. There is the option of going to some area with a much lower cost of living and trying to hire there, but the problem might be getting enough people together to form a team. If you can easily get enough people with skill and experience, the area probably has jobs for them that pay better, and if those jobs don't exist, it might be hard to find the people. 1: https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality/san-francisco https://www.federalpay.org/gs/locality/san-francisco
- C1sc0cat 7y agoNone of those comments really help explain why the bottle necks. If the form has to go into a mainframe well just set up an asynconous Queue
- macintux 7y agoValidation is the problem. If someone thinks they’ve successfully applied, rejecting them asynchronously is often worse than not letting them apply in the first place.
- llampx 7y agoThe government generally has no problem with rejecting filed claims after review.
- macintux 7y agoI’m sure, but there’s still, I’d wager, an order of magnitude difference between the paperwork rejected now and that if users were unable to receive immediate feedback in order to correct their input.