[gota]

> 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.

That is the hard part in any system, not just government. Especially government, maybe, but not uncharacteristically and certainly not exclusively!

[ahartmetz]

I have read similar things about payroll software. The thing about laws, regulations and payroll is: you do not get to adapt the rules to the software, the software has to implement everything exactly as prescribed. Even that one-off thing from 1977 that still influences a few pensions by a few cents a month.

[bongodongobob]

I work for a company that employs ~5k people. There's an entire IT team just for payroll and it's bigger than Ops. When Elon says he and a handful of devs were going to fix the entirety of the Treasury dept on their own, they are either lying, or have no fucking idea what they're doing. Probably both.

[throwaway81523]

They saw the movie "Dave" and didn't realize it was fiction.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The thing about laws, regulations and payroll is: you do not get to adapt the rules to the software, the software has to implement everything exactly as prescribed.

You do not get to adapt the rules to the software. The government can look at the state of the rules, say "this rule is obsolete, inefficient or unnecessarily complicated" and enact a different rule.

They rarely do this, which is why having someone go through and make the attempt is potentially valuable.

[throw0101d]

> That is the hard part in any system, not just government.

Another episode from Odd Lots, "Why Corporate America Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks", with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 here at HN):

> Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season, thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest isn't alone in having software in the headlines lately. The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this month. So what's the deal with corporate software? Why do these crashes happen? And why does the user experience typically leave something to be desired? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Patrick McKenzie, an expert on engineering and infrastructure, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter and recently left payments company Stripe after six years. We talked about the challenges of keeping any software system alive after years of upgrades and updates, the distribution of tech talent across industries, and whether non-tech companies can close the gap with Silicon Valley.

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why-corporate-america-...

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-still-r...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UQaXpzwQA