Four IT professionals lay out just how destructive Elon Musk’s incursion into the U.S. government could be.
  • jdeath@lemm.ee
    3·
    13 hours ago

    ok this article was a hilarious shit show. full of gems like

    The former Treasury official told us that mainframes—and COBOL, the ancient programming language they often run—are really good for what they do,

    ffs

    • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
      4·
      4 hours ago

      if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I’ve worked plenty of private sector jobs where they use COBOL somewhere in the company

      • jdeath@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 hour ago

        so have i. this is the technology community, after all. for a couple years i worked for a major cruise line and each ship had an AS400 on board. so I’m familiar with mainframes, and sure they are un-removable for a number of reasons. but that statement was stupid

    • melp@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      11 hours ago

      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.

      • sp3ctr4lEnglish
        2·
        58 minutes ago

        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.

      • jdeath@lemm.ee
        1·
        1 hour ago

        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

  • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
    23·
    21 hours ago

    We really need a protest movement in itself to get rid of Elmo. Say what you will about Trump, but that dingus is far more dangerous than trump ever could be.