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Newly unemployed New Yorkers are being frustrated by 1970s-era technology
- jrockway 7y agoIs anyone working on scaling up approaches like the US Digital Service? It is clear that government is often shafted by contractors that spend very little of the project budget on programmers, and it's starting to hurt people (rather than just being a tax on progress).
- thanksforfish 7y agoUnfortunately the problem is more complex than just contractors. The Government could easily push contractors to hire a larger percentage of programmers, and reject contracts with low programmer head count by claiming that such setups do not appear likely to succeed. What's the US Digital Service approach?
- sambull 7y agoHe's still trying to figure out how to get the required intact wax seal to come thru the fax.
- nkrisc 7y agoIn an alternate timeline, people complain about how much it costs to refill the proprietary wax cartridges for their fax machine.
- jlangemeier 7y agoIn an alternate, alternate timeline, carrier pigeons never went extinct and stayed as the height of asynchronous communication... pgsql (now termed PigeonSQL) is built on top of an elaborate system of carrier pigeons holding and moving small scraps of paper around a large warehouse... pigeons carry messages along extraordinarily complex plexiglass tubing so that today's kids can play their latest video games... and the fax machine is nothing but carbon paper, a press, and a paper affixer with a well trained carrier pigeon standing by, the worst part of the upkeep is all the damned bird seed. Pigeonpunk (patent pending)
- maallooc 7y agoSerious question: Should I learn COBOL in 2020-0?
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoIt might be lucrative but every account I've seen has said it's endless frustration.
- vitno 7y agoOnly if you are interested in working on legacy systems in large bureaucracies. This may or may not pay well. My understanding is that most of the well paying side of this has actually invested in migrating off COBOL over the last decade.
- clort 7y agoare they 'translating' so you need to know COBOL or are they just creating new software to the same spec?
- annoyingnoob 7y agoMy not-very-recent-at-all experience with COBOL is that COBOL is used in the most boring applications at the largest institutions. If you find your self looking for work you might have to move to a different city.
- justin66 7y agoHave you ever said to yourself "self, I really want to work on large, badly maintained accounting and finance systems that should have been retired years ago?"
- ape4 7y agoI just checked... there are still online fax services.
- degenerate 7y agoYou can take a picture, convert it to PDF, and fax it... all on your phone. Some apps offer this for $$$, but it's possible to get it all done for free using websites (take pic -> convert to pdf online -> fax with faxzero.com). Some paid apps even mimic a scanned copy by having you take multiple shots and reconstructing what the paper looks like into PDF automatically. The government will always be slower to respond to change, so it's sad to hear a story like this. However the author had an excellent opportunity to educate its readers, but instead focused on the fear factor ("...he had to go to a Staples store in the middle of a pandemic...") - no, he didn't have to do that. Pretending the only way to send a fax involves finding a fax machine is disingenuous.
- danielmarkbruce 7y agoYes, true. And, the person is being given money.
- enitihas 7y agoTo be fair, the majority of people can barely resize an image, let alone take a good quality clear photo, convert it to pdf, and then have the knowledge of online fax being possible.
- Drakar1903 7y agoWith respect to all the elders for whom all of this computer technology stuff came up pretty late in their lifetime - when and where do we draw the line about basic computer competency?
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoI doubt there any estimates on the number of people who can fax a PDF from a phone. But I'd be surprised if it was much higher than 25%. Most people here could probably work it out eventually, but most people are not the general population.
- 7y ago
- chris_wot 7y agoWow, awarded contract to TCS. That’s going to go well.
- ilrwbwrkhv 7y agowhat's tcs?
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoTata Consultancy Services (I think).
- arenaninja 7y agoThat was my take away. Imagine awarding these government contracts to foreign body shops
- henriquez 7y agoNew York could hire their unemployed software engineers to replace the backend for their unemployment system. It would make something positive from the situation.
- arenaninja 7y agoIt seems the contract was granted some time ago (2017?) so it's unlikely this is a choice. But yes, I think municipal/local government contracts should look to source these things locally
- nova22033 7y agoFrom the article.. Last year, it awarded a $56 million, five-year contract for that solution to Tata Consultancy Services
- discordance 7y agoBoeing tried that. Went really well.
- Hokusai 7y agoI have a digital signature for all my online interactions with the government. In Sweden, for example, there is a system named BankID that is used to access your bank account or pay your taxes. The last time I used a fax was one connected to a Windows 2000 server in a small company. So, I will use a scanner and use the shares fax printer. Thanks is almost 20 years ago. I am surprised how low tech the USA is. I would have expected something like that in a small countryside town, but never in a major city. What's the reason for such a sad state of technology? I do not find it reasonable nor cost effective.
- Nextgrid 7y agoFax is often used in healthcare. As bad as it is, it has the advantage of being universal - there is no vendor lock in. When the alternative is lots of separate systems with their own incompatible file formats and terrible user experience, faxing a document (which produces a paper copy on the other side) might be the easiest way.
- scollet 7y agoI wish there was a universal paper to OCR protocol.
- solatic 7y agoEmail is also universal. The difference is that fax has a legal exception carved out for it that permits HIPAA-compliant systems to consider fax as secure while email is considered insecure and thus non-compliant. Of course fax is horrendously insecure. But the legal exception stands, and when your security posture is dictated by regulatory compliance and not by results, then it's the best solution.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoThe issue is not "why don't they upgrade the system" but the issue is "does it do what is required of it by those who sign the cheques"? Sadly, being a "hostile environment" for claiming benefit is exactly what large numbers of welfare systems the world over are designed to do. It has taken a decade for America's Underclass to claw its way back to parity - given how many more people are affected this time round, I doubt any country, even US can afford to stall so many of its citizens for so long again. We can mail everyone a cheque. That might be the simplest solution all round.
- twblalock 7y agoMailing everyone a check at the scale of the US population is also a technology problem. I don't expect it to go very well -- it will happen slowly, a lot of people entitled to checks won't get them, checks will be sent to the wrong places, etc.
- rocky1138 7y agoDeposit $1000 into every account electronically
- crooked-v 7y agoWhat about the people without bank accounts?
- twblalock 7y agoI have 3 bank accounts. Do I get $3000? What if one of them is a joint account with another person? It's not that simple.
- alexpetralia 7y agoThis part I actually don't think is that complicated. Only one of those bank accounts paid a tax liability or received a tax refund last year. The same one will receive this direct deposit.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pcurve 7y ago"Ms. Steffens said that Connecticut has had to resort to recruiting retirees who knew how to program in COBOL, a nearly extinct computer language." I work at fortune 25. We are training college grad COBOL. It may be endangered but it won't be extinct for decades.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cheerlessbog 7y agoDo you find it hard to attract college grads to do that?
- pcurve 7y agoNo because we don't tell them when recruiting. Lol. It's because we only need small percentage to know it and they get to work on other stacks.
- rodgerd 7y agoWe have a college grad who volunteered for one of our COBOL/assembler teams. The kind of alpha nerd who runs his own reverse engineered WoW server, that kind of thing. So it might seem surprising that he's want to be buried in COBOL-land, but his rationale was pretty simple: he wanted to come to work, build things, and go home without being on a treadmill of learning new crap all the time. That was a decade ago. He comes to work, he churns out business functions, he goes home and fiddles with whatever amuses him. Meanwhile the grads in the same era who came into .NET or Java teams have gone through how many patterns and frameworks? .NET to .NET Core + .NET to all .NET Core, WPF, UWP, whatever the new hotness is? J2EE, SpringBoot, microservices, JSF, React, React Native, etc. I find it hard to think he did the wrong thing, really.
- PaulHoule 7y agoI've applied for jobless and other benefits on new York and never used a fax machine. I'd complain that the job listings are choked with spam (e.g. A job listed in Ithaca is really in Syracuse, nope, really in Atlanta) but other than that their systems work OK. The leader of my friend's coven wrote new printer drivers for 390 mainframes because IBM couldn't be bothered to support enough printer ports that NY needs to support the mandate of turning around paperwork in 2 days. NY really does it: I get my tax returns freaky fast compared to the federal gov. Drivers license and car permit renewals are fast, permits to stock tripod grass carp, whatever.
- js2 7y agoThis is an example of administrative burden. In this case, it's due to bureaucratic incompetence, but it is often an intentional policy lever to limit access to benefits: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/28/upshot/administrative-burden-quiz.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/28/upshot/admini... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid-enrollment-obstacles-kentucky-work-requirement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/upshot/medicaid-enrollmen...
- kurthr 7y agoExactly, and it’s not just in one state. Florida’s website was apparently designed to keep the reported unemployment rate low, by making it difficult or impossible to file. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-unemployment-website_n_5e87b67ec5b6e7d76c63bcf7 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/florida-unemployment-website_...
- wpietri 7y agoAnd just as often, I'd add that it's more about systemic factors. Let me quickly tell the story of GetCalFresh: https://www.getcalfresh.org/ https://www.getcalfresh.org/ This was built by some friends of mine, my former colleagues at Code for America. Their basic notion was that applying for CalFresh (our version of food stamps) was too hard. So they applied classic Lean Startup techniques to solve the problem. They ran Google ads and directed assistance seekers to a simple Typeform that had barely enough information for the best case, and figured out how to get people benefits Then they iterated rapidly. You can read more of their story in this two-part article: https://leanstartup.co/part-1-from-root-hypothesis-to-functional-software-with-code-for-america/ https://leanstartup.co/part-1-from-root-hypothesis-to-functi... https://leanstartup.co/part-2-from-prototype-to-real-transactions-testing-with-code-for-america/ https://leanstartup.co/part-2-from-prototype-to-real-transac... From the stories I've heard from them over the years, the real problem was neither incompetence nor malice. It's that doing anything involving a lot of different people is really hard. The counties actually had online application for years. But those systems were built by large government contractors, and they focused on satisfying the law and the rules. They focused on completeness, on perfection, on conformance to spec. Like so much enterprise software, user experience just ended up being a low priority. There are lots of causes for that, but it's not like any single person is to blame. Everybody's just responding to their local incentives, trying to get by. Happily, a lot of the people in government I've met truly believe in public service. For me the moral of GetCalFresh is that almost everybody involved wanted things to be better. The trick is showing them how to make that happen in the context of the system they're in.
- elliekelly 7y agoMaybe the only example I’ve seen of technology failing to keep up with proposed changes to the law/policy, usually it’s the other way around: > New York, she added, also had a distinctly punitive approach when calculating benefits for part-time workers that withholds 25 percent of what they receive in a week for each day they work, no matter how many hours they put in. That means that if an unemployed actress spent just an hour or two a day three days a week delivering groceries for a service like Instacart, she would forfeit 75 percent of her weekly check. > Legislation to change the rule appeared to have the support of Mr. Cuomo and legislative leaders last year, she said, but no bill was ever signed into law. Mr. Blum said he was told why: The Labor Department’s primitive computers could not be reprogrammed quickly enough to make the adjustment. So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.
- JadeNB 7y ago> So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law. Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? It seems far more likely that someone was looking for an excuse and found one. (At the very least, the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology speaks to the general motivation not to invest money here, if not to any specific sneakiness around this case.)
- Sharlin 7y agoI'd be inclined to invoke Hanlon's razor here.
- philipov 7y agoAnd I'd be inclined to counter with Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." http://wikidumper.blogspot.com/2007/07/greys-law.html http://wikidumper.blogspot.com/2007/07/greys-law.html
- joncrane 7y ago
- MrPete012 7y agoQuestion: Sure, we can send you anything you need, you just need to fax us your ID. Answer: I can not do sofrom where I am now. Question: Why so? Were are you located? Answer: 21st century
- mindslight 7y agoI'm certainly not justifying the state of affairs, but there are a lot of private institutions that still operate with faxes as well. They'll accept an original document either snail-mailed or faxed. The easier and quicker option is obviously fax. Of course the fax encoding and their document management system will likely muddy the details up. So the actual person processing the document will call to confirm the details, and half the time you end up emailing them a crystal clear image file anyway. I think it's more a legal technology and workflow problem than a computing technology problem. When fax machines were new technology, the legal work was done to bless accepting facsimiles of raised seal documents. Now "modern" B2B faxing works good enough, so this work hasn't been done for emailed images. (And ironically with a good scan you can actually see the physical relief of a raised seal) FWIW another thing I've found is that even when you can upload image files directly to a document management system, you likely want those to be black and white (not greyscale!), otherwise they will be turned to black and white with an unpredictable threshold, also destroying details.
- EamonnMR 7y agoThe problem is it's legal to create totally unreasonable processes and expect people to just sort of deal with them.
- mindslight 7y agoBack when the fax process was first being implemented, it would have been a convenient advancement. So while your point does have general merit, it's not particularly applicable here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- klinskyc 7y agoPosted this on twitter, and will re-offer here. At my company , we have had to build an e-fax platform due to faxing still being used heavily in the medical space. If anyone needs to fax documents for unemployment, DM me on twitter or email me (email in HN profile) and I'll set you up so that you can fax for free.
- klinskyc 7y agoTwitter link is https://twitter.com/klinskyc/status/1246465251614363650 https://twitter.com/klinskyc/status/1246465251614363650
- humaniania 7y agoThis site lets you send faxes for free as another option: https://faxzero.com/ https://faxzero.com/
- LgWoodenBadger 7y agoI'm curious about what your e-fax platform is. I've integrated our platform with 2 e-fax providers and I'm not happy with either of them.
- klinskyc 7y agoHi, We're nor particularly happy with our API partner either, so would be happy to share experiences. Can you email me at cavan at gethealthie dot com ?
- protomyth 7y agoYeah, we get that a lot. Its amazing how many faxes we send for students. In a bigger city the library or a UPS store (or equivalent) can be used, but here we do it for them. Its the same for things that won't ship to a PO box, as we get some student shipments for students who haven't figured out how to write a BS address the UPS guy would figure out. Expecting people to have actual addresses that result in home delivery is just not something that you can depend on in the US.
- anoplus 7y agoWow. This problem exists in my country's gov entities too. Only as a result of public pressure they finally enacted the "faxes law" demanding public entities to allow digital means of contact. Now they struggle to enforce the law and faxes are still bottle-necking administrative processes.
- williesleg 7y agoYeah Cuomo's been cutting back the IT work force and outsourcing to H1B's for years. Stopped paying maintenance and upgrades. It's crazy.
- someonehere 7y agoSurprisingly the film industry still uses fax machines. And some use FileMaker Pro believe it or not.
- reaperducer 7y agoSame thing happened to a relative on mine two weeks ago when she tried to apply for unemployment. The state web site wanted additional documentation, and because the walk-in offices are closed, the only allowed method of delivering the documents was by fax. I signed up for an e-fax service and sent the paperwork for her. She also mailed a copy just in case, though that wasn't listed as an approved method of sending in paperwork. While I think the state should be able to accept paperwork uploaded to its web site, I understand them not wanting to do that. With the way we've seen unemployment insurance web sites overloaded to the point of crashing across the country, uploading is no longer as reliable as fax. Some would say it never was. E-mail is a worse solution, IMO. I say this based on the number of misdirected e-mails I receive in my commercial mailboxes from people who mistake one of the web sites I run for all kind of businesses from Boeing to hospitals. Millions of people think nothing of putting all of their personal, exploitable information in an e-mail to a stranger. I work in the healthcare space, and the social media guy says that people are forever sending him very personal health information through Facebook, Twitter, and other insecure methods. Or worse — when he posts something about a particular condition, hundreds of people will post photos of themselves asking if he thinks they have it, too. Fax isn't perfect. But it is far better than what Silicon Valley has given us to date.
- Spooky23 7y agoGood point. The failure is that there is no open, interoperable way to transfer files.
- charleslmunger 7y agoHttp POST isn't interoperable and open?
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoTry sending an HTTP POST to someone's phone.
- Spooky23 7y ago
- Sam_Harris 7y agopaywall
- Proven 7y agoObamaphone last time, Trumpfax this time around?
- thanksforfish 7y agoCan we get a fax.gov? It's great that there are so many websites that can fax a PDF for you, but theres good cause to not trust them with your private information. Especially given the sort of information a Government service needs to process a claim. Until the Government can figure out how to make usable websites, fax.gov would be a safer fallback. It can charge a small fee for service, and maybe whitelist known Government fax numbers (to prevent scammers from convincing people to send data to a scam number).
- anticensor 7y agoUSEMS (United States Electronic Mail Service) as a branch of USPS is urgently needed. However, it should not be operated in a for-profit manner.
- nn3 7y agoI'm idly wondering how today's "modern" Java* micro-service buzzword driven setups will look to someone who has to maintain it 40+ years later. Maybe COBOL and mainframe wasn't that bad after all.
- ffdjjjffjj 7y agoAt the very least they won’t require the physical presence of a mainframe and that’s something.
- blhack 7y agoAn as/400 can be about the size of a normal desktop case.
- williamdclt 7y agoI don't think that's the point. Whether the machine is small or big, the physical presence is the pain point
- lumost 7y agowill our clouds be running in 30-40 years? will they expose the same APIs?. There is a hidden pro that there will be a maximum "unnattended" lifetime to a lot of todays software.
- snovv_crash 7y agoNo, instead you depend on AWS to not change their API for 40 years. I'm not sure it's an improvement.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoThey will require different cloud providers to still provide the same interfaces. Good luck with that. You also need different package repositories to still work. I think a mainframe is a safer bet.
- JamesSwift 7y agoI used to use online fax services but I never quite felt comfortable with them having my data. So last time I had to, I looked into it a bit and it turns out Twillio has a programmatic fax option, so I signed up for a fax-enabled number and put it in a lambda [1]. Upload the fax somewhere accessible (e.g. dropbox/s3) and sent the url to the handler. It ended up being really cheap/easy so I keep paying for the fax number now just in case I ever need to do it again. [1] - https://github.com/J-Swift/lamda-starters/blob/master/examples/node_twilio_faxer.js https://github.com/J-Swift/lamda-starters/blob/master/exampl...
- chewz 7y agoThere is no app for that?
- mjevans 7y agoPaywall so... archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20200405204230/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-unemployment-benefits.html https://web.archive.org/web/20200405204230/https://www.nytim...
- mirimir 7y agoI get that these are hardware/software issues, but this is the same deferred maintenance gotcha that's plagued public infrastructure generally.
- lkrubner 7y agoWhy rewrite a system that's working? This is why. You can't just coast on the amazing system someone built in the 1970s. Because in a crisis, no one is left who knows how to scale it up. Most of the devs from the 1970s have retired. Make jokes about NodeJS or Rails if you want, but right now NJ and NY could find a ton of Node devs.
- commandlinefan 7y agoI’m sure they’d be happy to authorize a rewrite - as long as you can do it in two weeks, breaking every task down to a four-point “story” before you’ve even looked at the scope.
- ddrt 7y agoHeh, maybe we will finally get an honest “follow the money” moment in NY and we’ll get to see exactly why they are still on fax.
- LeoTinnitus 7y agoYou can blame the government for that one (not specifically BECAUSE it is the government). They made rules about privacy during an era when tech was still growing. With banking, education, and healthcare, this is a norm. You have to fax because somehow computers are "scary and hard to understand!" so we just still use fax machines. This is also what happens when you have a government that doesn't act proactively to hire people who are competent and gets people as the lowest bidder or a stable wage that never.changes...
- rodgerd 7y agoYears of voting for leopards to eat welfare recipients' faces turns out to bite people in the face when they become the welfare recipients.
- nayuki 7y agoRelated: "Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems (2016) [pdf]"; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22783355 ; https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf
- every 7y ago"Jot down your specific request and any relevant particulars. Enclose your card. Have your man bring it around and I'll ascertain it makes its way into the right hands. Expect to be notified by post on any conclusions, settlements or further necessary queries. Yours, ~~~~~~~"
- kindly_fo 7y agoPoliticians are elected based not skill but marketing. The hardest job for them is to win elections and then they use connections to make money. At least in eastern eu. If politicians would need to be tested and can be easily fired maybe they can do smth. But in todays system it's nearly impossible.
- ChrisArchitect 7y agoall the fax and COBOL talk today, this throwback comic has come up a few times: In the 24th century... https://abstrusegoose.com/323 https://abstrusegoose.com/323