Enough Musk Spam

These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?

It's because that explanation isn't correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.

Note that isn't a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of 'everyone' with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don't do it.

Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I'm sure there is a larger answer.

However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn't even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.

How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?

I studied COBOL a bit in college and it's not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason ...

I don't know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc...

There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.

You wouldn't say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven't had the time to get to greybeard level yet

In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.

Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL...

So do many older private companies.

Like banks. Account balances, transactions.

Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.

Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider 'modernity' is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.

We're gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and ... there just isn't anyone who actually knows how to do it.

He would dismiss COBOL and try to prove that he is a super cool geek with a deep knowledge of DnD and gaming culture. So more like:

"COBOL? Such a language doesn't even exist unless you think Kobolds are real! Hahaha"

I don't think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.

They'd probably just delete the Cobol code since "nobody would use that old stuff anyway".

2016-2020 was the age of too stupid to break everything. Now we're staring down the barrel of "The files are in the computer?" But the entire US government is the computer.

I dont even program and i could've told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol "durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11"