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IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

nextgov.com

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Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#161

Post by Jach »

candreasen wrote: post #135
rbanffy wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they open-source it? I assume finishing it would be relatively quick and a lot of comp-sci graduates would love to have the chance to play with IRS systems.

I'm guessing that would scare the crap out of the masses. Security by obscurity may not work but if there ever were a glitch or breach it sure does look bad to say "and they knew about the bug because we made our codebase public"

I don't think you could spin it that way. "The popular media can only handle ideas expressible in proto-language, not ideas requiring nested phrase-structure syntax for their exposition." Though maybe a better reason is that there doesn't seem to have been any such spin on big open source issues (such as Heartbleed) of the recent past. Why would they spin it as an open source problem rather than say a government/contractor competence problem (or something else) in the IRS case?

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#162

Post by mankash666 »

ep103 wrote: post #104
mankash666 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to not read articles written by non-tech people. Or, acknowledge the fact that a journalism major can only put in words what he understands of a deeply technical matter that's outside his expertise

Or, suggest that this is a low quality article, and if journalistic enterprises want to report on subject matter, they should have their articles approved by people knowledgeable in that subject matter.

You're assuming the target audience to only comprise of subject matter experts. This article is perfectly ok for 90% of the tax paying population that works outside tech

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#163

Post by arcticbull »

Retric wrote: post #40
raverbashing wrote: post #34

The question for the industry remains: how do we deal with systems that should be up for 10 years? 25 yrs? 50 yrs? 100 yrs? We didn't even have computers as they exist today 50 years ago. How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software?

> How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software? As strange as this may sound, documentation. Software is at it's core rather brittle it's designed to operate inside of a very specific system and trying to make it portable is only reasonable when you know the target ahead of time.

Better yet, test cases. That way you can throw your new implementations against them.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#166

Post by cat199 »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #155
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a relatively solved problem. Abstractions. 50 years ago the IRS had to build a webserver, the servlet application code, it had to build in fault tolerance without SQS or Kafka. If built today, the IRS' entire system would probably run on Rails with JRuby, deployed with Docker and K8s, and be 1000x more maintainable.

50 years ago the WWW didn't exist and there was no such thing as a servlet. The system ran on a mainframe not 50 but 60 years ago. The only high level language at the time was FORTRAN, but this system was apparently written in assembly language. Does anyone know the type of computer it ran on? The article it linked to says IBM mainframe but which model?

> The only high level language at the time was FORTRAN, but this system was apparently written in assembly language.

No direct insight to the actual system used, but FWIW IBM mainframe assembly IMHO seems 'surprisingly' user friendly due to the large amount of standard macros/routines provided, clear/direct integration with JCL, and the minimalist ethos of the OS. Take a look at some youtube videos for some examples, it actually looks like a fairly interesting/productive, if arcane, environment. Writing clean/well architected applications in it doesn't actually look like it would necessarily be a ridiculous notion.

Of course, how well any given production system was constructed and what cruft has accumulated in it over 50y is probably another story..

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#167

Post by hermitdev »

s2g wrote: post #123
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here is a huge problem with our industry. If you're not jumping from employer to employer every 1.7 years, you're labeled as out of date. It takes some really talented developers to truly understand some of these old systems. They should be given the proper respect they deserve.

No, you can stick around. I wouldn't consider someone who spent 5 years on AWS, especially if they moved internally, out of date. Whereas I've done nothing remotely close to where I want to be in about 3 years. I feel very scared about my skills, especially since I'm not even 10 years into my career.

I spent 9 years at my first FT job out of college at a hedge fund known at the time for culling the bottom 10% of performers annually at the time. That long of tenure at a place with that reputation has openned more doors than it has closed, especially within the finance industry. Lately, I've been getting 4-6 emails from local recruiters per week.

An aside, even when you spend that long in a single position, you do need to keep learning on new and relevant technology; I attended every on house training seminar I could, which helped a lot, and spent a good portion every day reading. I spent 7 years at that company in the same effective role, and never changed job titles, but saw a >200% increase in take home pay in that same period.

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#168

Post by pzone »

mbell wrote: post #102
reaperducer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you can continuously keep your code / systems up to date Easy to say as a grunt, but businesses (and governments) are run by managers and accountants. What you describe is upgrading for upgrading's sake. If a system isn't broken, there's no point or financial reason to replace it. Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data…

> Imagine trying to upgrade a system with incredibly complex data on a BILLION users that has to work 24/7, then deal with massive data influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year. I think you're over-estimating the amount of data involved. There were about 150M individual tax returns and ~5.8M corporate returns in 2015. Even if we assume 50 years of storage in the 'active' dataset that…

Regarding the latter point: one of the goals of modernizing the system is that it should give the IRS the capability to implement a modern fraud detection system, or calculate your taxes for you (if Intuit ever lets that happen.)

Re: IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware

#170

Post by saratogacx »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #155
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a relatively solved problem. Abstractions. 50 years ago the IRS had to build a webserver, the servlet application code, it had to build in fault tolerance without SQS or Kafka. If built today, the IRS' entire system would probably run on Rails with JRuby, deployed with Docker and K8s, and be 1000x more maintainable.

50 years ago the WWW didn't exist and there was no such thing as a servlet. The system ran on a mainframe not 50 but 60 years ago. The only high level language at the time was FORTRAN, but this system was apparently written in assembly language. Does anyone know the type of computer it ran on? The article it linked to says IBM mainframe but which model?

They use IBM/360[1] mainframes. Bloomberg had a good story [2] some time ago that was re-run last April 17th on some of the history.

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tech-timebomb-the-irs-is-...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-17/the-irs-c...

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