General Discussion

It royally pi**es me right the f*ck off because I'm, let's say, rather senior in my job and getting tired of it ... I have basically been keeping retirement in my back pocket. That is, up til now when things get too crazy at my job, I can (or was able to) keep the perspective of "well I can retire any day now so f*ck em if what I'm doing here isn't good enough". That perspective really lowers the anxiety of dealing with the daily craziness at work.

Understand, I do realize there are loads of people who are WAY more vulnerable to what is going on, so speaking of "perspective" ... BUT now I am back to having to actually care about some of the less sensible instructions that are sent my way. Sigh.

One small quibble with the OP. Where it says "The Social Security system ... is likely one of the most complex systems in the world." Um, I seriously doubt that - at least from the perspective of the requirements it needs to meet. I work with enterprise software that crosses many more domains than what I believe SS and SSDI need to do (for example SS doesn't worry about manufacturing products). THAT said, the RELIABILITY should be right up there with defense stuff, because people's lives depend on it. And it is likely that the code is very tightly coupled, which is a bad thing meaning it is hard to rewrite pieces separately. In fact if you said "is likely one of the most tightly-coupled systems in the world" I would probably agree. (and maybe that is what you mean by "complex" in this case)

Bottom line is we are on a course for disaster if the LOON actually implements the nonsense he is talking about.