| > Can’t wait for Musk’s team to finally peel back these layers, realize that the code actually implemented the laws […] Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on this: the hard part in replacing/updating government system is not the coding part. The hard part is understanding the policies that have been changed and modified over the decades. See "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023): > There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge. Related, "Why COBOL isn't the problem": * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420217 |
That is the hard part in any system, not just government. Especially government, maybe, but not uncharacteristically and certainly not exclusively!