As I was sitting here yesterday evening it came to me. Musk keeps using these guys because they’re willing to do things these other more experienced people are not. I want to be crystal clear: This isn’t something I’m reporting. I believe it’s just the most logical reading of the available evidence.
Basically, people who are a bit older know that it’s not worth committing a crime because their boss said so, but a bunch of interns who don’t know better are willing.
A lot of them don’t even seem to have any IT/software muscle. I keep reading that they basically have zero experience with a lot of the languages (COBOL), databases, or software that is used in the government. So these people get into the servers and start digging around in code and data that they don’t even have a fundamental understanding of and are essentially making shit up about their findings.
And the use of COBOL in government systems is not some big dirty secret. A quick search finds news articles, from mainstream to industry sources, talking about its continued use a few times every year. So going in expecting something modern is ridiculous. Just goes to show how stupid the people planning and executing this moronic plan really are.
Also like duh. Its the us government. If you’re hiring coders to get into every aspect of it and don’t have cobol and Unix capacity you clearly didn’t think or prepare
I would have been surprised if they weren’t using COBOL especially when it comes to the Treasury.
Cobol is heavily used in the financial industry for a reason. It’s actually excellent for processing financial data at scale and it’s well supported. Many of these institutions attempt to swap out parts of these systems with modern languages or runtimes; these projects often fail because they’re simply too slow or the new systems crash too often.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to do so, just that it’s not worth it.
If I know anything about financial systems, I expect that some super critical process in Treasury is coded in like assembly via punch cards in some yellow aged plastic box using an Intel 4004 with like 640 bits of RAM supported by like a single centenarian on an as needed support contract because that’s literally the last person on earth who knows how it works and why.
Yeah, no shit – most of them are basically college-student-aged. CS undergrads are pretty much fucking useless at accomplishing anything on any real-world production systems (as opposed to making barely-working toy implementations to turn in for an assignment and never touch again).
Pretty much
Exactly what I was thinking of. Their misunderstanding of something like the different data types and epocs for time values is crazy.
Any time I get a weird date/time value the first thing I check is what the epoc and smallest unit of time is as it’s far more likely I’ve done some bad math than something that old actually being valid.
Edit: spelling