Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
Agreed (context: same legacy system work, 20 years), although given the size and scale of the tech debt involved, I’d peg it at 5 years if you had a team of 100+ COBOL developers.
10 to do it right.
Once you start dealing with databases older than SQL and languages older than C, things get funky real fast.
I’ve been party to dumping legacy systems and lift & shifts a few times.
Good fucking luck.
Knowing nothign about this, a project like this would take at least 2 years even if you are dropping a ton of use cases and dependencies.
Agreed (context: same legacy system work, 20 years), although given the size and scale of the tech debt involved, I’d peg it at 5 years if you had a team of 100+ COBOL developers.
10 to do it right.
Once you start dealing with databases older than SQL and languages older than C, things get funky real fast.