Child’s Play
We’ve all heard the stories about the government’s website, Recovery.gov, and they are replete with tales of errors that, were they to occur in a business, would get the people responsible arrested or sued.
A county with 50 jobs created, only upon closer scrutiny no jobs were created at all, but existing employees all got raises. Or a new central air conditioning plant was installed. Or the parking lot resurfaced. Or a better brand of coffee put in the lunchroom.
Then there are the non-existent Congressional districts. Quite a few of them. Millions spent in places which don’t exist. A simple clerical error, we are told. Could happen to anybody.
No. It couldn’t. It could happen only to an idiot who didn’t insist on computer programs at least as good as what the owner of a $10 million plumbing wholesale company would insist upon. I used to do these things. When a customer number is entered it is checked by the computer to see if it is a valid number. If it isn’t the entry isn’t accepted. The same goes for
- a part number
- a salesman number
- a unit of measure (foot, box, each, coil, pound, dozen, etc.)
- a general ledger (accounting chart) number
- stock quantity
- a vendor number
- a ship date
Every time something was entered that could be checked it was. The operator couldn’t enter an invalid sales territory because the system wouldn’t allow it. This was in 1979 on rudimentary mini-computers with 10-megabyte hard drives and 256K of memory for the whole computer with four workstations. They don’t make a cell phone today with those limitations.
Today with all the lightening-fast hardware and unlimited on-line storage these geniuses can’t check to see if a Congressional district exists before assigning X million dollars of Stimulus money to it. The systems I worked on would ship an order, cut an invoice, record the payment, do the payroll, and at the end of the month the general ledger had better balance to the penny.
Now they think they’re OK of they’re only off a billion or so because they sent money to people, but they don’t know who, who work somewhere, just where is uncertain, in places that don’t exist.
And they say computer programming is hard. Even a child could do it. Do this well, anyway. And get paid $18,000,000 for it, too.
