[Themaintainers] Why does the IRS need $80 billion? Just look at its cafeteria.

[M. Scott Ford]

I was staffed at IRS for about an 18-month period in 2005-2006. From my time working there, I can confidently say that the IRS doesn't waste money on purpose. A lot of the challenges that I saw there were the result of short-term thinking.

For example, I was working on a system that was being used by the folks who were responsible for answering questions when someone called on the phone. I shadowed one of those folks one day because I wanted to see the exact series of steps that was causing a bug to occur, one that I was having difficulty making happen on my own. While watching that person work, I noticed how much time and effort they were spending fighting the application's user interface. I came up with some ideas for how to fix these problems. I estimated that it would save the person about 1-2 minutes per call and a lot of frustration on the part of the person who was using the application. I was told by the government manager that oversaw my work that "the government isn't paying for things to be easy to use; as long as it works, that's good enough. Just fix the bug and move on to the next one."

That is just one concrete example. I hope that the culture has changed since then. And I hope that the folks who have ideas of ways to improve things are actually given the power and psychological safety they need to share their insights.

M. Scott Ford
Co-Founder & Chief Code Whisperer (CTO)
Corgibytes, LLC
804.596.2375 x701
pronouns: he/him
scott at corgibytes.com
https://corgibytes.com ( https://corgibytes.com/ )

Have you read our First Round Review ( http://firstround.com/review/forget-technical-debt-heres-how-to-build-technical-wealth/ ) article about paying off technical debt?

Love refactoring and TDD? Join us at LegacyCode.Rocks ( http://LegacyCode.Rocks ) for virtual meetups, podcasts, and more.

Sent via Superhuman ( https://sprh.mn/?vip=scott@corgibytes.com )

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 2:53 PM, David Eddy < deddy at davideddy.com > wrote:

> 
> Camille -
> 
> On Aug 09, 2022, at 1:07 PM, Camille Acey < connect@ camilleacey. com (
> connect at camilleacey.com ) > wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> (e.g. COBOL is sturdy legacy tech that has withstood the test of time!)
>> 
> 
> 
> Please do a service to the world of software maintenance & do NOT
> perpetuate the myth that old COBOL is a significant portion of the IRS’s
> challenges.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Foundation of IRS systems were written when THE choice of languages was
> pretty much Assembler (maybe with some Algol & FORTRAN).  COBOL didn’t
> enter the market until mid to late ‘60s or so.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> The technology dates to the 1970s
> 
> 
> 
> Nonesense… try 1930s with EAM / card punch / plug board processing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> IRS is obviously saddled with very unique challenges… Capital Hill law
> makers that makes pretzel twisting look like straight-line thinking &
> major volume issues.
> 
> 
> -David
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Themaintainers mailing list
> Themaintainers@ lists. stevens. edu ( Themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu )
> https://lists.stevens.edu/mailman/listinfo/themaintainers
> 
> 
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20220811/dd268706/attachment.html>