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Ask HN: Should software developers weigh in on the U.S. debt limit debate?

1 points by michaelwww ↗ HN
The U.S. Treasury system is essentially a large series of software programs for making payments. Treasury officials are claiming they can't modify the software on such short notice to prioritize payments. Also, the world financial system is essential a large software eco-system that operates under the assumption that debt payments from the U.S. will be always be made and U.S. debt instruments will always be available. What would be the best way for computer programmers and software developers to validate the opinions of those who say it is nearly impossible to modify the software on such short notice and attempting to do so might have unintended catastrophic consequences?

2 comments

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onion2k
These systems are very likely a range of processes from decades-old UNIX systems to modern cloud apps, mostly with poor documentation and relatively opaque code. Without a good working knowledge of the systems involved, you can't really have an opinion on the ease of modifying the code.

If you do have that knowledge though, write to your representative. Inform them about the situation. The more information they have the better.

michaelwww
Very few of us have such detailed knowledge and there isn't time to do an analysis. I was thinking more of a back of the envelope calculation that no, you can't introduce a new constraint into the world financial software system in a week's time and expect everything to work something and making some kind of statement from the industry about that - a petition might work. I'm just brainstorming here because we're running out of time and the party in opposition is saying it would be no big deal, but they're not economists or programmers.