7 ms·

Maybe 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 a

Maybe 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 So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.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 So they failed to modernize the technology and then used the outdated system as an excuse not to modernize the law.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 ago
  I'd be inclined to invoke Hanlon's razor here.
  - philipov 7y ago
    And 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
  I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs. It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got. The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.
  - shizcakes 7y ago
    Avoid ageist comments, please.
    - joncrane 7y ago
      Well you pretty much have to be 50 to have had the same programming job for 25 years, it's not so much the age as the tenure. But I will take out the age.
      - jlangemeier 7y ago
        I would still say it's pretty shitty to assume that "SV culture" is the only thing that innovates, or innovates quickly, which is what you're implying. There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  >the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology // Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies. That means until the legislation is updated (and after!) government departments might need to support "primitive technology". Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible. That makes it hard to adopt new tech, and harder to dispose of old tech. The only need for a fax machine I've had in recent times (in UK) is by proxy, a pharmacy needed a fax from my nephew's doctor in order to issue an emergency inhaler. Of course billions has been spent inter alia on replacing fax, through having integrated, networked medical systems in the UK but the IT companies involved have been "unable" to provide working systems. £20bn in ~2007, £12bn in ~2013 - I don't think we have a working national records system yet? Companies who can make £100s of millions without delivering a working product wish to continue being paid, the money stops when they deliver the project ...
  - danans 7y ago
    > Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies. > Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible. Isn't that a good thing? You probably don't need the latest whizbang tech stack and UI framework that needs a screaming CPU, tons of memory, and a 4G connection to implement a usable government service website. You do need a good design process at both the UX and data processing level, focused on clarity and simplicity, with lots of unit and integration tests.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Yes, I'd agree slow progress with near universal access is good; I was being descriptive. But it still needs to utilise the best of established technology.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    It seems like you're making the parent point for him/her. Yes, governments should support 100% access. Requiring a fax machine for anything, as in this case, goes against that. (Great that the UK doesn't force this on people though!) Edit: one line I like to use when asked to fax something is, "Oh, sure thing, I know there's a museum right nearby!"
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? Have no clue about the political will here, but the outdated failed technology story sounds very believable to me!
  - JadeNB 7y ago
    To be sure, I don't doubt that the technology failed. I meant only that it was surely not a case of political will to action being stymied by failing technology, but rather something between political inertia and will to inaction meeting happily with the failing technology which was, after all, its bequest.
wpietri 7y ago
Generally, I think it's very much both. People's expectations for what's possible is based on experience. And that experience is driven by by previous expectations. I've helped some places shift to a much faster delivery cadence. That's really easy to do if you have a clean slate. E.g., when I co-founded something in 2010, we started with a weekly delivery cadence and the turned up up, so that a team of 6 was shipping 2-3 times per day. Our infrastructure and our code was very much tuned for that. It took some work to get to that level, especially in terms of automating absolutely everything, but once we'd done the work it was fine. In fact, it was great! In contrast, I've tried to get existing companies just up to a weekly cadence. That's an incredible slog because expectations, tools, and processes are all built around much slower cadences. It's not like anybody was bad. It was just that if you were only doing something quarterly or annually, it made no sense to automate it. Or even understand it, really. There was a lot of the business version of, "Honey, where did we put the Christmas lights? Did we replace the wonky tree stand, or did we just talk about it?" It's a nightmare. And the whole time most people are like, "Why are we bothering to go faster? The old approach worked!" And for them, it did work. For a lot of government stuff, I think the change cadence co-evolves. Law is pretty stable, so people just build with low change frequency in mind. A decade later a change comes along and it's really hard, so the higher-ups learn to minimize change. That makes things even worse; requests are now met with high budgets and long lead times, meaning legislators learn not to propose small improvements. That legal stability biases the tech staff and processes even more to not touching anything. And of course, so much of this stuff was built long before we figured out how to maintain quality in the face of frequent change. Two decades in, there are a ton of new companies that still can't do CI/CD and automated testing well. It's no shock code from the 1970s hasn't caught up.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
What's the betting that the alteration needed is to change 0.25 to 0.025, say, and then record hours worked instead of days ... ? But, hey they might end up paying someone more than a pittance, and that would never do, eh.

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 ago
I'd be inclined to invoke Hanlon's razor here.
- philipov 7y ago
  And 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
I think people are overestimating the competence of government IT programs. It's possible to quickly make the technical changes, but when politicians asked the small group of people with direct knowledge of the issue, this is the answer they got. The small group of people are not plugged into SV mentality quick iterative work. They include (for example) a Perl programmer who has had the same job for 25 years and isn't interested in learning new skills.
- shizcakes 7y ago
  Avoid ageist comments, please.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    Well you pretty much have to be 50 to have had the same programming job for 25 years, it's not so much the age as the tenure. But I will take out the age.
    - jlangemeier 7y ago
      I would still say it's pretty shitty to assume that "SV culture" is the only thing that innovates, or innovates quickly, which is what you're implying. There are major impediments that are non-technical for those of us in government positions, just take a look at the bidding process for projects that are pretty much required for something the scale of "overhauling" the system backing state or federal programs. Is it necessary? Probably not. Does it happen anyway because it's required? Yes. This isn't the fault of some tenured programmer, hell, they're probably not even consulted as a knowledge worker as part of the bid process. This isn't a failure of culture, this is the failure of a byzantine beauracracy built around protecting itself instead of the people it's meant to serve. You can have all the innovation that comes out of the NIH, the NSF, DARPA and the NSA; but the amount of time even practical papers and systems that are produced by these institutions are put into practice by the government thay funded them is exceedingly slim due to the institutional rust that's in place. Many of these "SV culture" companies are actively building things that were first concepts in a government lab, but by all means, blame the underpaid, overworked technical staff that actually designed them.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
>the fact that the Labor Department still has this primitive technology // Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies. That means until the legislation is updated (and after!) government departments might need to support "primitive technology". Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible. That makes it hard to adopt new tech, and harder to dispose of old tech. The only need for a fax machine I've had in recent times (in UK) is by proxy, a pharmacy needed a fax from my nephew's doctor in order to issue an emergency inhaler. Of course billions has been spent inter alia on replacing fax, through having integrated, networked medical systems in the UK but the IT companies involved have been "unable" to provide working systems. £20bn in ~2007, £12bn in ~2013 - I don't think we have a working national records system yet? Companies who can make £100s of millions without delivering a working product wish to continue being paid, the money stops when they deliver the project ...
- danans 7y ago
  > Sometimes law enshrines the ability for access using particular technologies. > Government is often about supporting as close to 100% access as possible. Isn't that a good thing? You probably don't need the latest whizbang tech stack and UI framework that needs a screaming CPU, tons of memory, and a 4G connection to implement a usable government service website. You do need a good design process at both the UX and data processing level, focused on clarity and simplicity, with lots of unit and integration tests.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Yes, I'd agree slow progress with near universal access is good; I was being descriptive. But it still needs to utilise the best of established technology.
- SilasX 7y ago
  It seems like you're making the parent point for him/her. Yes, governments should support 100% access. Requiring a fax machine for anything, as in this case, goes against that. (Great that the UK doesn't force this on people though!) Edit: one line I like to use when asked to fax something is, "Oh, sure thing, I know there's a museum right nearby!"
BurningFrog 7y ago
> Surely no-one really believes that political will was thwarted here by failed technology? Have no clue about the political will here, but the outdated failed technology story sounds very believable to me!
- JadeNB 7y ago
  To be sure, I don't doubt that the technology failed. I meant only that it was surely not a case of political will to action being stymied by failing technology, but rather something between political inertia and will to inaction meeting happily with the failing technology which was, after all, its bequest.

wpietri 7y ago

Generally, I think it's very much both. People's expectations for what's possible is based on experience. And that experience is driven by by previous expectations. I've helped some places shift to a much faster delivery cadence. That's really easy to do if you have a clean slate. E.g., when I co-founded something in 2010, we started with a weekly delivery cadence and the turned up up, so that a team of 6 was shipping 2-3 times per day. Our infrastructure and our code was very much tuned for that. It took some work to get to that level, especially in terms of automating absolutely everything, but once we'd done the work it was fine. In fact, it was great! In contrast, I've tried to get existing companies just up to a weekly cadence. That's an incredible slog because expectations, tools, and processes are all built around much slower cadences. It's not like anybody was bad. It was just that if you were only doing something quarterly or annually, it made no sense to automate it. Or even understand it, really. There was a lot of the business version of, "Honey, where did we put the Christmas lights? Did we replace the wonky tree stand, or did we just talk about it?" It's a nightmare. And the whole time most people are like, "Why are we bothering to go faster? The old approach worked!" And for them, it did work. For a lot of government stuff, I think the change cadence co-evolves. Law is pretty stable, so people just build with low change frequency in mind. A decade later a change comes along and it's really hard, so the higher-ups learn to minimize change. That makes things even worse; requests are now met with high budgets and long lead times, meaning legislators learn not to propose small improvements. That legal stability biases the tech staff and processes even more to not touching anything. And of course, so much of this stuff was built long before we figured out how to maintain quality in the face of frequent change. Two decades in, there are a ton of new companies that still can't do CI/CD and automated testing well. It's no shock code from the 1970s hasn't caught up.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

What's the betting that the alteration needed is to change 0.25 to 0.025, say, and then record hours worked instead of days ... ? But, hey they might end up paying someone more than a pittance, and that would never do, eh.