31–40 of 224 posts
Just imagine if this new system was converted to groovy or scala. That would be pretty amazing.
Are people writing new non-Jenkins Groovy code in 2018? What's the use case? Legitimately curious. My experience with Groovy is always frustration and I liken it to the Coffeescript of Java.
> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…
The GS-15 range for the DC area is $135k-164k. For federal government employees, salary only represents about half of their total compensation, which includes a lifetime inflation adjusted pension and medical benefits.
Actually this is the best analogy I could possibly imagine.
Java seems like a good choice for the IRS. There are legions and legions of programmers well versed in Java, since its among the most commonly used programming languages to introduce programming at universities. This means the IRS should be able to focus its hiring on "People who know tax law and can use Java" instead of "Java experts that know enough tax law to be dangerous". Its not the flashiest language, but I th…
> Assembler is like Shakespearean English. It’s dated. A shrinking number of people can deal with it. But it’s also elegant and highly functional. What is considered elegant and functional about assembly?
Even with that, the junior engineers (familiar with assembly!) were completely flummoxed by it. Domain knowledge encoded in assembly rapidly becomes highly obfuscated, even when written in a literate programming style.
I simply cannot imagine calling large-scale enterprise business logic written in assembly "elegant and functional" for any reason. Even the best written, best documented assembly obfuscates so much meaning .
Wow, what a cool project to work on: working out the logic flows in assembler and breaking them out so that they can be translated into a higher-level language. I've always thought that this type of government work should be open to bids from anyone . If the government is worried about trojans, malware, etc., then they can easily hire an auditor to audit the code and vouch for its authenticity. The fact that only ver…
I would disagree. On of my first jobs was porting assembler to C for a paging switch. The assembler was well written and well documented. The task was slow, hard and painfully boring. It took months to get every function to be a perfect match.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are people writing new non-Jenkins Groovy code in 2018? What's the use case? Legitimately curious. My experience with Groovy is always frustration and I liken it to the Coffeescript of Java.
Gradle plugins? I wouldn't choose it over Java full time but it has some niceties like multi-line strings to help with testing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big trick is the proposal itself. Writing that is only possible if you are already tied in at all kinds of levels. I've seen some of these tenders up close, the companies that land the deals submit phone book sized proposals to tenders that are officially open but actually closed unless you are in a very select circle already. It's not uncommon for the proposal writer to then pass on the actual work to a whole sl…
Are you saying this is how contracts are awarded on FedBiz Ops? I know a handful of small players, myself included who have won IT contracts with the gov't and it is not at all like you stated.
I've worked for the government on small jobs here in the EU a couple of times, as long as you stay below a certain amount you can bypass a ton of requirements. But once you go above that threshold the number of players drops very rapidly and there is no escaping the formal process.
If you are capable of selling large contracts to the US Federal Government without having to submit a typical bid proposal then you are in a very fortunate position, but the people that I know that have done this in the past have all worked on stuff that either required their fairly unique skills or they were working on extremely small contracts (< $250K).
Sounds like a great reason to simplify our tax system!
> Wang was working under streamlined critical pay authority the agency has had since its landmark 1998 restructuring. It gave the IRS 40 slots under which it could pay temporary, full-time employees higher than GS rates. Former Commissioner John Koskinen pointed out Congress did not re-up this authority in 2013, despite his entreaties to former Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform…