Enough Musk Spam

115 sounds too late imo, payments should need manual verification way earlier

What do you expect? most of the guys in "DOGE" weren't even alive on 9/11 I'm a bit surprised that they still have something in COBOL, maintenance probably costs o fortune, good luck finding young COBOL devs

These are the same interns that are pushing code in production, right?

It's because that explanation isn't correct. The real deal is you just have entries without a death date, so if you ran a query this get super old ages as a result.

Note that isn't a database of payments or even people eligible for them, just a listing of 'everyone' with a SSN. There is a separate master death index. In the old days, wild west kind of stuff people would disappear so the death date would never get entered. Modern days every morgue and funeral home has to legally notify SS when someone dies, there is a specific form and major hell to pay if you don't do it.

Also a lot of people between 110 and 150, so I'm sure there is a larger answer.

However, Social Security cuts off at 115, and they supposedly found like 10 million people older than that. Considering there are only ~50m people on Social Security, and the database they were searching wasn't even about current recipients, most people would conclude that there is likely an error in data, rather than immediately jump to fraud. Of course, ketamine is a hell of a drug and Elon is not most people.

How many teens you think can actually read and understand legacy languages like FORTRAN and COBOL? Let alone a complex codebase written in them?

I studied COBOL a bit in college and it's not exactly hard to read short snippets if you understand other languages, but good luck wrapping your head around anything remotely complex and actually understand what it is doing without having someone who understands the language. Hell, 15-20 years on and multiple languages later, my eyes still cross trying to read and grok COBOL. The people supporting those old code bases get paid well for a reason ...

I don't know how many teenage programmers you have interacted with recently, but they are generally just learning the basics, learning core concepts, experimenting, etc...

There is a huge gap between making small, sometimes very cool and creative even, projects and understanding a giant legacy codebase in a language that is not taught anymore. I mean, even university grads often have trouble learning legacy code, much less in COBOL.

You wouldn't say your average teenage cook could make a gourmet meal for a house of 50 people 😅 not a dis, just they haven't had the time to get to greybeard level yet