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The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Technology
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I've had conversations with people who work in various gov sectors and you'd be very amused. Social security and the IRS aren't that much better.
yeah i work in tech (at a bank rn) and the mainframes are hilarious. a constant source of downtime, and insanely overpriced hardware to boot.
literally i can't think of any downtime our services have had in the last six months that wasn't caused by the mainframe's downtime. this is dozens of cases.
but they will basically never be replaced. maybe in 100 years? ha
I worked in primary metals for a while, core business applications still ran on mainframes, they had a project to move some of them to SAP that apparently had the same timelines as nuclear fusion (perpetually x years away).
I worked at a large import export firm based out of Seattle a decade ago. All of their internal and external accounting ultimately relied on COBOL as well.
A single guy maintained it all... he also wrote it all, originally. Got back from the Vietnam war, learned COBOL with his GI Bill, went to work for this company, stayed for his whole life.
He kept telling the board that they needed to find a replacement, or three, for him, when he retired.
They did not, at least not before he retired, and I left several months later due to every system I relied on to do my work breaking down after he left.
Gotta love a single point of failure where that point itself sounded the alarm.