Ah yes. This reminds me of the story of Musk decommissioning Twitter’s redundant servers.
“An IRS engineer explained that the *soonest* this change could get deployed is July 21st... 103 days from now”
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Where I used to work we called that “malicious compliance”.
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That IRS “engineer” knew how he was just soaking the system......if he’s not any smarter than that he doesn’t deserve the position and should be removed.
Now that’s funny
Same old problem: There is no reason for the gov’t to do anything in a cost-effective manner. Indeed, they have every incentive to do the opposite. Your path up the social ladder in DC is a linear function of the number of employees you control. A friend of mine in the 1960’s was finishing grad school and got a job with a new agency in DC. A few months after starting, his boss came in and announced that everyone should let their “Inbox” pile up... no explanation. About 4 days later there was a “surprise” inspection by the GAO to see if the agency really did need more workers. Seeing the stacked-up Inboxes, the agency got more employees. That agency had about 20 employees when he started. It now has 16,000+. It’s the EPA.
Judge orders the button returned in 3... 2... 1...
What kind of “red tape” causes it to take 4 months to move the position of a log in button on a web site?
below the fold?
It’s printed on a newspaper?.........Man they are behind the Times!.......and the Post.........and the Chronicle.........
At one company I worked for, the 14-person software team was required to submit paperwork for Engineering Change Orders proposals. These were reviewed once a month by a Review Board consisting of enginners from hardware, software, drafting, technical writing, and fiscal managers. Only "approved" change orders could be implemented, except for changes that fixed a documented ticket from Field Service.
These proposals had to detail the tasks that were required to implement the change and document them to customers.
Malicious compliance: I and a couple of my cubicle buddies became good friends with the Field Service people. During informal meet-ups in the cafeteria, they would describe their pet peeves to us software guys. As a group, we would craft trouble tickets for the FS guys to submit. During the ticket submission process (which was considerably more streamlined than the ECO process) we software guys would scaffold the changes and test them. When we got the ticket paperwork, we'd push the software change through.
Now, why the tangle? Our customers would pay literally millions of dollars for the banking equipment systems. Management didn't want to lose control. (But they did!)
The cost savings to the company was measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, plus improved customer word-of-mouth advertising. An increase in the number of service contracts that sales people sold.
(That was almost 40 years ago. The company is now history.)
And if you asked the “engineer” why it would take 103 days, he would probably say something like - “Well, the guy I replaced would have taken about 182 days. I’m much faster than him”. /s
They just broke a ton of AI agents and automation routines.
In ANY Enterprise level organization this would be a very quick fix for a non show stopper. They didn’t just move the login link, they also rejiggered the middle container. Dev time was prolly like 20 mins, unit tests 20, QA 20, and 11 minutes to deploy the pipeline live. This was a front end only change. They are using Drupal for CMS and this is a static page, meaning no data is being pulled in by APIs. That makes it a lot easier. But this is escalation to the highest levels.
DOGE
the cyber ceebees
“the difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer”
Thank YOU DOGE...
It's a ridiculous statement. Yes, there were great people in the Stasi, or Enron, or Saddam Hussiens army.
But political, financial and bureaucratic corruption is pervasive in all large human organizations - particularly governments agencies that are not subject to social or market forces.
If Musk, Trump or anyone else thinks they can train a Fed.gov elephant to dance, they are badly mistaken.
Dang you for posting this RN. Now I gotta explain the SDLC to the entirety of FR so they understand how this stuff works. This was an impressive turnaround, but it was no miracle. I’ve turned show stoppers that included both back end and front end changes at the two largest telecoms companies in America in under an hour at 3AM on many occasions. It just requires the proper escalation. Now, if I may, I have a bunch of user stories to write.
wow... someone flag John to see this!! Maybe this can be a motivation to set the focus on the “Reply Text” field!! after 25 years, I still find myself typing an entire paragraph before realizing I’m not typing at all but scrolled down to the bottom of the page!! AAAAAAARGH!!
Someone start a petition to remedy this!!
Now if they could only eliminate the login button entirely.
Government web page changes usually have to be approved by diversity units to ensure they are culturally sensitive.
