I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most responsible or intelligent solution? Is there no way to authorize some kind of emergency system built with modern tooling to offload the system burden and then process it later through the system of record? If I were trying to deal with this problem, my approach would be the following:
- Organize the legislature(s) to pass some kind of emergency act that gives protection around PCI compliance and that sort of thing to new engineering teams
- Hire business and technical experts, fast
- Build a system on AWS that can handle massive scale and start offloading the most important business functionality to that system (things like registering for aid, fraud prevention)
- when things begin to return to normal, start processing requests through the original system, deal with problems, whatever
I know all of this is not easy. Legal and compliance stuff is tough, and I know the domain itself must not exactly be simple. But this is an emergency, and it calls for emergency measures. Trying to hack your way through an ancient code base on the fly seems like it might be doomed to failure.
I think you underestimate the scope and scale of systems like this. And maybe overestimate the success rate of rewrites, made worse when the developers have no domain experience and a rushed schedule. Under the best conditions rewrites fail more often than not.
Maintaining legacy code isn’t always easy, but it has a big advantage over a rewrite: it works and satisfies requirements to some non-zero percentage, whereas imaginary code built with “modern tooling” does not work or meet any requirements. COBOL and old business systems aren’t that hard to understand.
I completely agree. Rewriting a system on the fly is absolutely going to fail. There are no requirements and without the domain knowledge, there is no way that anything could be completed correctly in any reasonable time. This is a project that should have been scheduled years ago.
Some level of technical debt will exist in every organization. The problem is that NJ never had prioritized this work and now they have an emergency and they are looking for volunteers. They should absolutely should be paying for this work.
I wasn't imagining a full rewrite, more like a "holding area" that could defer some of the load. Again I may be totally wrong about this—I have never written a COBOL system, and if there is some plausible way to make it effective for this problem in a reasonable timeframe, then I understand why that would make sense. I understand all of your reasoning and agree with it in general. I know rewrites are very expensive and often ineffective. I'm just skeptical that the system can be modified quickly to deal with this new load. But again I am not an expert and could be totally wrong, and I'm open to being convinced.
The big problems likely have very little to do with COBOL, which is just another programming language, not an alien artifact. The problem is legacy systems like this that pre-date relational databases (mid-1980s) have huge volumes of data stored in application-specific formats that modern languages don't have drop-in packages or libraries for. The data is always a bigger problem than the code in large systems.
For the record, I wrote enterprise software in COBOL back in the late 70s and early 80s. COBOL itself is no big deal to learn or read. Working with huge volumes of data stored in proprietary binary formats (which COBOL was designed for) is not something I want to go back to -- relational databases rule the world for a good reason.
As for shunting some work to another system, imagine how you would do that with something much simpler. Suppose Excel suddenly stopped working for you with some big spreadsheets. How would you shunt that to another application? How would you do it without risking the important data? It's not a simple problem of just spinning up more servers and replacing some old data management code with MySQL or Redis.
Yeah whatever happened here, the communication from this person's leadership was bad. I'm not trying to vilify them—maybe they had their reasons—but OP is clearly confused about why they were laid off and how (if) it could have been avoided. If I were going to fire someone with 15 years' experience, I would really try to give several clear warnings and actions leading up to it, assuming that was my actual reasoning.
"Fired" and "laid off" are two different things entirely. OP was laid off, not fired, and I think it's reasonable to assume that the pandemic was the immediate cause of having to cut staff. There's really no way to give several clear warnings about that.
This is the thesis of Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies." He argues, correctly I think, that you can find intellectual strands going back to Heraclitus and Plato which revolve around the idea of some "central force" or "law of history" that enables a thinker to predict the future. He says that the alternative and preferable society is a skeptical one that views history as a series of experiments and tries to infer what amount to rules of thumb rather than grand "world historical" theories or forces.
"East of Eden." Steinbeck draws beautiful vignettes of human life and emotion, and I think the book's main idea about human motivation is largely correct and explains a wide variety of behavior. It helped me see both myself and others with more clarity.
I consider Steinbeck's way of creating a multi-character narrative that so completely encompasses human nature in as many ways as he does one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had reading. I would compare the satirical cynicism of the multifaceted characters of Catch-22 (a recommendation) to the rich characters of EoE.
Funny coincidence - I'm just rereading this book now, and I think I like it more than the first time (~11 years ago). Getting older makes me appreciate Steinbeck even more.
But I'm not entirely sure about his discussion of the word "timshel" in the original Bible. I'm a native Hebrew speaker, and I don't read any "may" into it - it's more of a declaration of the future like "you will rule/control it" rather than "you may rul/control it".
That's interesting. Steinbeck researched his books extremely thoroughly, so you'd expect for something so central it'd be correct. Would be good to follow this up with experts now that we have the luxury of the internet.
Agreed, same here. When I finished it I felt that I had witnessed something profound and ancient and true. No other book has done what it did to me, though I'm not sure I can even describe it.
If there are two "mental tools" I wish we could teach every person, they are exponential growth and statistical thinking. Neither is intuitive, but they would help people understand this whole situation (and many others) a lot better.
My high school math teacher introduced exponential growth by asking the class if we'd take $1M now or $0.01 doubled daily for a month. We, as most people do, wanted the $1M, but the penny turns into more than $5M.
Had to explain this to someone yesterday. They literally wouldn't believe me until I screenshotted an Excel spreadsheet of the daily doublings, despite a finance degree.
I think that's exactly the issue. People can't picture it. You can show them a curve on a graph, but that doesn't translate for people without a mathematical/scientific background into "a shitload of people will get ill very quickly." Our brains seem not to be very well wired to make the connection between mathematical abstractions and reality, and aside from the minority of people who seem to just "get it," people don't understand without a good explanation from a very good teacher.
We technology people don't just inherently "get it", but rather have experience traveling up and down in powers of two for things that are meaningful to us. A month has 30 days - that's easily recognizable as a giga (2^10 ~= 10^3). And a billion isn't even that large to us.
Very true. But it doesn't stop there. One of my pet peeves is that people who believe they understand exponential growth will extrapolate too far in the future. More often than not, processes working against the exponential growth, negligible small in the beginning, will grow even faster and will reduce the grow rate, even without external intervention.
In the example of COVID, it's the chance of interaction of an infected with an uninfected, even without social distancing, just because so many people will be infected, or dead. This effect is completely negligible in the beginning, but dominates in the end. (Of course, all the people modelling the epidemic have this effect in.)
I like to think that every contact outside increases risks. And conversely, to keep my sanity, that every prevented contact helps reduce the risk a little bit
"It's a great pleasure to be here, and to have a chance just to share with you some very simple ideas about the problems we're facing. Some of these problems are local, some are national, some are global.
They're all tied together. They're tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn't very difficult. What I hope to do is, I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Most people I try to explain the current problems are really not able to understand. I explain that the spread is exponential, and that the problem is that is grows so fast. I say look at the graph from China, look at the graph from Italy.
They answer "ah, the Chinese maybe hid some numbers."
I say, it just doesn't matter, only the shape of the curve matters, and it repeats in every land. Even if the Chinese hid half of the cases, that difference disappears in only three-four days in our locations, where it grows so fast, as it grew in China before they did their measures, much harder than ours.
They don't understand still. They think only "80000 in China is more than "50000 in Italy" and it stops there. That Italy will get from 50K to 100K in four days, that's what they don't understand until they'd see it happened, but it would still, sadly, not convince them in anything.
Whereas, not only it's just the shape of the curve that matters, we know exactly why the spread is exponential, and what has to be done to change the shape: manage to stop the people who have it to transmit the virus to the rest of the population. It's "just" people who spread it -- the virus is not a bacteria, it doesn't live or multiply by itself, it needs a host which will replicate it, and the only host spreading it among the humans is human. There's nothing else that we know to work than that.
The major danger is that 4 from 5 carriers of the virus won't feel so bad to think that they should really stay at home. Most of the carriers aren't aware what they do. They all have their lives where what they do at the moment is "urgent" and "must be done." As soon as the droplets they produce enter the lungs of other people, the virus is spread. The droplets are tiny enough to be normally invisible to us, of course.
It doesn't help at all that the most of the highest politicians, across many different countries, downplayed the seriousness of the situation for a long time. Even less that the scientific ignorance was promoted as a virtue for even longer times.
This is a great example of where to use the passive voice. Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end.
In general, 2 good principles are:
1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
Orwell talked about where the passive voice is most dangerous/bad. It mainly comes down to thoughtlessness or insincerity. The passive voice removes or hides the actor, so it's useful for people trying to cloak their beliefs or hide assumptions.
"Politics and the English Language" is a great read, as is the book "Style."
Orwell also had no fucking idea what he was talking about and couldn't identify a passive to make a point about it.
Since you bring up "Politics and the English Language", I'll pull up some "Fear and Loathing of the English Passive":
> This is not a statistical quirk. Orwell’s writing features significantly more passives than typical prose. By one count, on average in typical prose about 13% of the transitive verbs are in the passive, whereas in Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English language’ it is 20% (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, p. 720, citing Bryant 1962). My own counts, adhering strictly to the definitions of Huddleston & Pullum et al. (2002), are somewhat higher (probably because I include passive participles used as modifiers rather than complements, which for some reason many grammarians miss), but the ratio is unchanged: by my count, about 17% of the transitive verbs in random prose are likely to be passive, while a careful count of the whole of Orwell’s essay shows that 26% are passive. By either count, then, Orwell uses more than one and a half times as many passives as typical writers.
He also freely admits at the end of the essay that he's sure he committed many of the sins he's preaching against. I suspect he'd also freely admit that there are reasons to use the passive voice. But I think his primary complaints, especially his egregious examples of academic and political writing, were right on the money.
And to quote from that very essay, "Professor Hogben... while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means".
That is, "egregious" used to mean—even as recent as in Orwell's time—"blatant, obvious, unconcealed, glaring". But apparently all such words also gain a secondary shade of meaning "bad" and come to mean "baltantly, openly bad, and proud of it".
All the more reasons to use smaller, shorter words.
> Austen reverses the sentence structure to pack the punch at the end.
> 2 good principles are:
> 1. Put the punch at the end of a sentence.
> 2. Put familiar information at the beginning of a sentence and new information toward the end.
> The passive voice can help you with both of these design goals.
This is true, but another major use of passive voice is to put the punch of the sentence at the beginning. Where you want the punch is a stylistic choice; it's not always best at the end. And passive voice doesn't guarantee anything about where the punch will go -- that depends on which phrases hold the punch.
Phrasing a sentence in passive voice lets you present the pieces in a different order and changes which pieces are required vs. optional. Those are important and useful things to be able to do, but if we always wanted to do them the same way, we wouldn't need multiple options.
You're right, this is really the deeper principle. I'm talking more "useful rules of thumb" as people are trying to build intuition for why passive voice might be useful. But at the end of the day it gives you more options about how to structure information. I think like a lot of tools it's easy to turn into a foot gun, so having some ideas about when and why it may be useful is good.
By the way, while the "punch" of a sentence is often placed either first or last for stylistic reasons, and both are fine, there is another kind of phrase for which final position is strongly preferred.
I believe they're usually referred to as "heavy" phrases[1], but the intuition is just that a phrase may consist of a lot of words, e.g. "the man who I spoke to yesterday about repairing the car". That phrase is, syntactically, just a noun phrase, and theoretically might fit into a sentence at any position where you might find "the cat" -- but in fact, phrases that heavy really, really benefit from being postposed if at all possible. Placing a heavy phrase in the middle of a sentence imposes memory burdens on the listener/reader that a short phrase like "the cat" wouldn't.
I bring it up partly because this is the kind of thing I find interesting, and partly because I think some editors might have this idea in mind, be unsure how to phrase it, and call it "the punch", when "the punch" is a better fit for a phrase that is felt to be especially relevant, surprising, or otherwise possessed of high emotional energy.
You'll find that even in the hard sciences, which are more objective many times over than the social sciences. Any complex field is going to generate controversy. That doesn't mean it isn't worth learning about.
That said, you should know why you're studying finance if you're going to spend the time on it. For me intellectual curiosity is a good enough motivator. It also helps me evaluate claims made by, for example, public officials. But I think it is reasonable to question whether it will significantly improve your personal financial situation.
"Money Stuff" is excellent. I also recommend the FT. Their Alphaville section is very good. One of my favorite classic Levine articles is "Regulators Want to Slow Runs on Derivatives."
Some other resources I came across via those and friends:
Money Stuff is great, and explains things quite well, generally, but I think for a beginner in the field it presupposes too much. It dwells on the amusing arcana, the esoteric warts of the system often, that you only appreciate once you have a certain base level understanding of the industry.
Lastly, it’s fairly focused on the investment banking side of things (derivatives, capital markets, IPOs, the finance industry), not so much on the monetary system, macro, and institutions.
On banking and banking regulation, making a case for higher capital (=equity) requirements for banks, The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig is a good read [1].
I can’t think of a good book on money and the various theories about - if someone has a recommendation there, would be great.
- Organize the legislature(s) to pass some kind of emergency act that gives protection around PCI compliance and that sort of thing to new engineering teams
- Hire business and technical experts, fast
- Build a system on AWS that can handle massive scale and start offloading the most important business functionality to that system (things like registering for aid, fraud prevention)
- when things begin to return to normal, start processing requests through the original system, deal with problems, whatever
I know all of this is not easy. Legal and compliance stuff is tough, and I know the domain itself must not exactly be simple. But this is an emergency, and it calls for emergency measures. Trying to hack your way through an ancient code base on the fly seems like it might be doomed to failure.