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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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I used to teach ESL to some banking IT people, COBOL programmers whose skills were still in demand half a century after COBOL came out. Because the banking systems written half century ago still work, and when it comes to handling other people's money, breakages, mistakes and downtime are absolutely not an option.
If Musk really wanted to run government like a business, he'd do like the banks and leave a working system damn well alone.
Of course, he wants to run government like one of his businesses, into the ground like Twitter or soon Tesla.
PS The only bank they knew of implementing newer tech for handling the money was a brand new one with no existing systems the new tech might break.
Exactly. IT folks know most large legacy businesses run on legacy code. The businesses do change the old code due to the risks.
I believe Elon thinks his team can do it. I believe he is wrong.
It took the DOT over 20 years to migrate their port of entry truck tracking system from COBOL to Oracle (god help them). That system is much simpler than social security.
Reminds me of when I worked on satellite c&c and the operating system was from the 1970s. I asked why they kept using such an ancient system and my boss said reliability was far more important than performance or optimization. It had a proven track record and on-site support calls for satellites were very expensive.
I remember seeing a doc about Wall of Death motorcycle riders. The bikes they used? Century-old 1910 Indians.
Why? Because when lives depend on it, you want a solution with the absolute fewest possible things that can go wrong. Not the latest fancy thing with all the bells and whistles.