> 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 influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year.
And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not.
Plus, you're dealing with people's money. You don't fuck around with people's money.
It would be easier to merge Facebook and Google's databases.
> 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 is < 8B returns. Also, most returns don't contain a particularly large amount of data in them. Pretty sure we're talking about an in-memory scale dataset here, certainly for the active set in any given year. It actually would not surprise me if we (current co) ingest more data in a week than the entirety of the US tax return history.
> And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not.
I might believe that is an issue if the IRS actually calculated everyones taxes for them and sent out a 'do you agree' form, but they don't. It's more like they randomly sample some returns based on some hand picked 'warning' flags and have someone manually check them, maybe with the help of some excel formulae.
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.)
Managers and accountants can handle the idea that a car's oil and tires need to be continuously replaced to keep the car in working order. They can handle the idea that airplanes need mechanics to go over them before every flight. They can handle the idea that certain equipment has a lifespan of X years before it needs to be replaced. There is nothing in management or accounting that is fundamentally opposed to the idea that something needs to be continuously maintained. It is simple incompetence by those in charge.
Imagine if you were an airline that payed your mechanics absolute bottom dollars and gave them incredibly silly restrictions based on fears of non-tech people. Imagine if you made them sit in countless meetings while people with more years with the airline made decisions that the mechanics KNEW were wrong. That's how the government does IT.
Exactly. The government also ensures that if an issue is found with a airplane The Shit Hits the Fan and multiple parties are heavily incentivized to fix it. We need a similar approach to critical IT infrastructure.
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 influx four times a year plus catastrophic data ingestion one time a year.
And not only take in and sort those records, but validate the data and perform calculations based on rules that change almost monthly, and that sometimes must be applied to years-old data and sometimes not.
Plus, you're dealing with people's money. You don't fuck around with people's money.
It would be easier to merge Facebook and Google's databases.