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

[A. Scarlet Galvan]

Thanks for this Camille, articles that highlight the everyday working
experience of US government employees are always fascinating to me
considering what voices define what infrastructure and by extension where
funding goes.

M. Scott - I saw the same temporary solution-thinking driving much of the
National Library of Medicine's resource sharing platform as well. So much
gets sent out to temporary employees where the directive is "make this work
again" that it must be challenging to develop any kind of overarching
strategy to maintain those systems in the long term.

-Scarlet

On Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 9:08 AM M. Scott Ford <scott at corgibytes.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> 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 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 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
>>
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