Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

breakingdefense.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 279 posts

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#111

Post by ska »

bogota wrote: post #43
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it. Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.

> Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast.

Do you think they aren't? I don't know any now, but the last one I did was making more than that 15 years ago.

Old crufty legacy systems in a big bureaucracy are many peoples idea of hell. Empirically speaking, good pay and job security aren't enough to have people knocking down your door for that kind of work if they have other decent options.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#112

Post by ramilefu »

whatshisface wrote: post #97
thelastgallon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is not a settled science paying people a lot more will automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. The…

250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced engineers.

Depends on where you live. An “experienced engineer” is going to make a lot less if they live in Mississippi than if they were in California. 250k for the former is likely “top dollar”.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#113

Post by airstrike »

HideousKojima wrote: post #83
intotheabyss wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of debt is to bring future revenue to the present so that you don't have to wait for savings to trickle in every year.

At the cost of some portion of your future revenue

and if that future revenue is N times greater than you would otherwise get without debt, then it's still better to take on debt.

Would you rather have 90% of $1M or 100% of $800k?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#114

Post by curiousllama »

jfoutz wrote: post #93

I know I'm incredibly naive, and there's no political will to actually make the system work. It seems like various sections and departments are passing audits. If you're within, say, 1% just allocate the funds. If you didn't pass the audit, fill out this form and then get the money. The form can be classified. I have no idea, but I'd imagine like payroll and taxes are pretty much perfect. Once you get a handle on who…

This is what they’re doing (“incremental progress” as they say). The issue is the scale of the system.

With a big enough org, the ongoing deterioration occurs faster than you can actually root cause and fix the problems.

You divide the orgs, they divide the pillars, they divide the groups, they divide the pods, they divide the teams… all the sudden, a 4 week root cause exercise takes a year and a half. By the time you implement the solution, you’re 3 years out of date. Whoops - administration flipped. They don’t care anymore. “What do you mean accounting - why are we behind China in AI?!”

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#115

Post by rumdz »

whatshisface wrote: post #97
thelastgallon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives only work on low-skilled labor that is quantifiable. Eg. more money for flipping more burgers. It is not a settled science paying people a lot more will automagically solve problems. People crave Autonomy, Mastery & Purpose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbR2V1UeB_A What is definitely going to happen is you will attract the cowboys who have convinced themselves and can convince you to pay top dollar. The…

250k is not top dollar, it is average for experienced engineers.

Outside of CA?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#116

Post by ebiester »

uticus wrote: post #44
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Of course, devil's advocate would point out COBOL in 60s was written with a lot more focus on lasting in general. They didn't largely have the same general attitude of 'we iterate quickly with our script kiddies' as is prevalent today. Not that all software from then was wonderful. Or that COBOL magically guarantees great code. But, on the flip side, you can't say the code base isn't battle-hardened (to various liter…

I can build you a team using today's (quality: average B2B startup) programmers and today's methodologies that will write software for 40 years.

It will just cost twice as much as the team that iterates quickly. It will cost more because I will spend more money on business analysis up front. I will spend more money writing automated tests. Most importantly, I will maintain my own toolchain and libraries or pay someone to do so. Every piece of software deployed will have someone accountable to my business to maintain it.

It turns out that this is expensive. It's no more expensive than maintaining the COBOL code, mind you, and would likely give you better results than the equivalent COBOL code. Most companies will take their chances with less expensive software because that's what their competitors do.

About a decade ago, I saw one of the major systems you talk about up close. While they spent that amount of money for mission-critical systems, they didn't do nearly as good of a job on the average software in the system. I'm not convinced that any business is ready to go back to the battle hardened days.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#117

Post by ska »

randmeerkat wrote: post #103
Jtsummers wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but not for contractors. Most software sustainment ultimately ends up in the hands of contractors with government supervision in the form of program offices. Not all, though, many programs are also "organic", primarily or fully staffed by government employees and managed by government employees.

> Yes, but not for contractors. Sure, but it’s not like the consulting firms are paying their “contractors” more, they just siphon up the difference for their shareholders.

That's not really how it works. They are more than happy to have "market forces" drive up the hourly rates, so long as they get to keep their overhead % fixed, and that's probably how the contract is structured. Win-win (and perhaps -lose for taxpayers).

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#118

Post by importantbrian »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #95
warner25 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all. I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?). I'd rather see a number of "e…

> I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road That's right - the, not unreasonable basis, is that you can't make informed decisions about whether you're getting good value for money, or how to change allocations, unless you've transparency into what that money actually does. It's approximately the same reason why financial s…

Also, audits are not 100% about saving money. They're also there to enforce conformity to standard accounting practices and try to make sure the books aren't getting cooked. Even if the books aren't getting cooked the only way you can be sure of that is to go through the audit process.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#119

Post by charlie0 »

nradov wrote: post #74
encoderer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai. It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.

The hard part of accounting systems is doing the requirements analysis (including interviewing humans who give inaccurate or incomplete answers) and writing detailed functional specifications which account for every possible edge case. No LLM can do that. Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal…

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. This. I see issues at my small startup with not having clarity with certain billing items. This issue is not technical, it's the unknown requirements of why things were written in the way they current exist. I can't imagine what kind of bizatine rules they have in the Pentagon that were placed there decades ago, and no one can answer why. Codebase must be littered with Chesterton fences.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#120

Post by thelastgallon »

Sounds like an ideal job for AI.

AI, please read this COBOL code and rewrite it all in Rust. Understanding 85 COBOL Standard reserved words is orders of magnitude easier than understanding English. AI should bludgeon this task in no time.

And Rust can be 180,000x faster[1], all the code will be efficient and run on a mac mini or raspberry pi.

It sounds like the easiest way for AI startups to make a pitch and collect a big bounty from Pentagon.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37964161

Post reply on HN