Yeah this stuck out at me - the hubris of the stateless web stack supersedes the 18 years of hard unsung work at building and end to end stateful pipeline that ties out to the penny and handles all the complex business logic and reconciliations seamlessly across god knows how many integrations. No fancy diagrams or pictures of the nameless faceless heroes that had accomplished that act of heroism. For sure recognizing the value is something to trumpet, but that’s the Herculean hero story I want to hear - the DOGE bros who tied it all together with JavaScript frameworks, yawn.
The only way the database could be harnessed to do something useful is after all the people who were standing in the way in management for the last 18 years likely having been sacked. You can bet any useful project to put it to use was blocked by paper-pushers threatened by the spectre of automation, until most people had forgotten about it.
Nobody believes the database sprung forth from the earth or was created accidentally. The fact that 18 years later that project had borne no visible fruit, and that most people who could have used it, didn’t even know about it, is proof of the problem. It’s a problem of terrible management. That is what, regardless of your politics, is being slightly jostled by DOGE. Personally I have dealt with enough of our absurd government processes that I don’t think they can make anything much worse, and it cannot be less efficient.
