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.

115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier

Cant wait till 2038!

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

These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?

The issue isn’t inherently age it’s just time and experience, understanding different coding patterns and paradigms that have changed over the years etc. Even someone who’s been coding every day from ages 14-20 can’t have the same knowledge and experience as someone who’s been working with software since the 90s or earlier. Granted, there will always be brilliant people who even when lacking experience are more talented and skillful than maybe the majority, but that is uncommon. I’m only in my late 20s. And I remember in college there was a huge diversity of skills, from “are you sure this career path is really a good idea for you?” To “holy hell how did you do all of that in one hackathon?” But even for those really smart folks, they aren’t just going to inherently understand all the different ways to organize and structure code, all the conventions that exist, and more importantly why those methods and structures exist and the history that informed them. I’m not saying you need on the ground experience (although, I’d say many people do, as many people can’t really internalize things without direct exposure), but there’s just not enough time, literally, in the handful of years that is childhood and teenage years to absorb all that history.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, yes, I agree that the problem isn’t inherently about being teenagers but I do think it’s a valid criticism that it’s kind of ridiculous to have such young folks leading this kind of project given it’s literally impossible for them to have the same amount of experience as software vets. It’s also valid that young people are capable of seeing things in very new ways, since they aren’t weighed down by al that history. But that’s why diversity is useful especially for such a monumental project as this.

I think it makes sense that people who don’t have actual experience in making projects in a specific language won’t be aware of details such as the value 0 being the default in a certain kind of field in a certain language which makes it a good flag for “data unknown”.

This is not a problem specific of teenage programmers - it is natural for just about everybody to not really know the ins and outs of a language and best practices when programming with it, when they just learned it and haven’t actually been using it in projects for a year or two at least.

What’s specific to teenagers (and young coders in general) is that:

• They’re very unlikely to have programmed with COBOL for a year or two, mainly because people when they start tend to gravitate towards “cool” stuff, which COBOL hasn’t been for 4 decades.
• They haven’t been doing software engineering for long enough to have realized the stuff I just explained above - in their near-peak Dunning-Krugger expertise in the software engineering field, they really do think that learning to program in a given language is the same as having figured out how to properly use it.

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 …

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

How much experience do you have in this? Talk is cheap

Could you elaborate on why?

It’s because that explanation isn’t correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.

Note that isn’t a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of ‘everyone’ with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don’t do it.

Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I’m sure there is a larger answer.

However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn’t even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.

Or supposedly received 9.223.372.036.854.775.807 dollars (64-bit max int).

In the legacy world we just call it the HIGH_DATE constant.

Not only do many important government systems ultimately rely on or make heavy use of COBOL…

So do many older private companies.

Like banks. Account balances, transactions.

Its actually quite a serious problem that basically nobody who needs to take seriously actually does.

Basically no one is taught COBOL anymore, but a huge amount of code that undergirds much of what we consider ‘modernity’ is written in COBOL, and all the older folks that actually know COBOL are retiring.

We’re gonna hit a point where the COBOL parts of a system to be altered or maintained, and … there just isn’t anyone who actually knows how to do it.

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”

I don’t think the government uses COBOL. I know the government uses COBOL.

They’d probably just delete the Cobol code since “nobody would use that old stuff anyway”.

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.

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”

More likely they nuke it due to that lack of understanding.