LMAO watch the US be saved by an inability of Muskys frat bois to understand COBOL
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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I dont even program and i could've told them it was probably a placeholder or default value lol "durrrrrr lot of people in this database were born at the exact same time on the same day in the same year that predates electronic databases, gotta be fraud!!1!1!11"
Also predates social security. It's the long con for sure.
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More likely they nuke it due to that lack of understanding.
2016-2020 was the age of too stupid to break everything. Now we're staring down the barrel of "The files are in the computer?" But the entire US government is the computer.
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Teenage programmers can understand legacy code. These ones didn't. Don't dis teen coders.
I don't know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc...
There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.
You wouldn't say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven't had the time to get to greybeard level yet
this is why, if they heavily modified the code in such a short time and they couldn’t understand it: it proves there was a previous data breach and they’re just installing the pre-written patches… the smoking gun that i can’t explain to anyone
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How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?
I studied COBOL a bit in college and it's not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason ...
Learning to COBOL is not itself that hard.
Understanding decades of "business" logic is.
It isn't WHAT it is doing, it's WHY it is doing it that makes these systems labyrinthian.
Also afaik they don't get paid that well which is part of the problem.
Heh, you are correct, it's always the why, even in a language you work with every day. It's hard even if it is you who wrote it if you don't remember the why, and then add an unknown code style and an unfamiliar domain. And on top of that maybe multiple projects interacting and I feel the burnout threaten I have to think of something else for a while 🫨
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In before Musk says "You think the government uses COBOL?!"
I don't think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.
It doesn't matter what I think or know, the government uses COBOL.
He would dismiss COBOL and try to prove that he is a super cool geek with a deep knowledge of DnD and gaming culture. So more like:
"COBOL? Such a language doesn't even exist unless you think Kobolds are real! Hahaha"
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The actual payment system stops payments automatically at age 115 and requires manual verification to restart. The database that is being reported is not even a report of who is getting paid.
This is just dramatic, public evidence of the arrogance and incompetence of DOGE from down to his racist younglings.
For a while, I thought they would at least be good at technology. This episode shows that even that is not true.
How he chose this elite group of chuckleheads is an eyebrow raiser. Other than racism, they seem to have no credentials at all. I mean, on brand for this administration I guess.
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I can't wait for them to discover a bunch of people who are 9999 years old next.
In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.
In my experience in the legacy world we have the isHighDate function which not only checks the constant, but also 5 other edge cases where the value isn't HIGH_DATE but should be treated as if it is.
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Jesus fucking christ the interns who have neither seen nor heard of COBOL have also not encountered the concept of a sentinel value used as a fallback/default.
What do you expect? most of the guys in "DOGE" weren't even alive on 9/11 I'm a bit surprised that they still have something in COBOL, maintenance probably costs o fortune, good luck finding young COBOL devs
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More specifically, they didn't find anyone receiving social security who were 150 years old because they didn't prove that they were receiving anything as that's not the purpose of that database.
Honestly, if you make it to 150 you deserve the money
I keep hearing that gen Z is actually pretty shit with understanding things outside GUIs.
And now I’m watching it actively destroy my country.
Less of a generational problem, more of an educational one. Selfish, badly educated grifters that got pushed into high offices can be of any age. Musk also didn't recognize SQL when he looked at it, which is arguably even more funny.
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tbf it's only embarrassing if you're capable of embarrassment.
But but it's BREAKING! With a red light emoji!
https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh
- There is no "date" data type in COBOL. Dates are stored however the programmer wants, but usually numeric character strings
- There's no "default" date, even if there were such a data type
- Even if there were a default, 1875 would be a bizarre choice
That (obviously) doesn't mean Elon Musk is right. It just means that this explanation of it being some magical COBOL epoch value is wrong. What's more likely is that the Social Security database is very old and has a lot of iffy data in it.
My guess is that it contains everybody who has ever had a social security record, including all the duplicates, all the typos, and everything else. At some point there were probably hundreds of thousands of records that were transcribed from paper into a computer, and it was considered safer to keep the iffy data and make a plan to deal with it later, vs. remove someone from the database who should legitimately be there.
I would also imagine that the systems that take the records out of the DB probably have filters in place that remove the (known) bad records before they're used.
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Eejit...
As someone who is working on a project of recreating an enterprise application in a modern tech stack, the legacy code is hard to understand too.
We have something similar in that a ClaimClosedDate is defaulted to 01/01/1900 and if it has that date it means it’s not closed whereas now that would be a nullable field.
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