Fujitsu "expert" helped Post Office falsely convict postmasters in IT scandal

[chenille]

A function name that documents what it does without needing comments, can be used by any temporary hire without any need for domain-specific understanding, will pass all unit tests. Save for the variable name d instead of NumberToHaveItsSignReversed, this is perfect code per corporate development philosophies. Oh, sure, there are probably more elegant alternatives but this is business not art.

[RickMycroft]

@MikeR

d = d - (d * 2)

Okay, maybe some programmers do have to worry about being replaced by AI. (On the other hand, that code is now part of the training data.)

[Kilkrazy]

Speaking as a Brit, the Horizon scandal is probably the worst of many big government procurement debacles in IT and various other areas of endeavour.

So far the only penalty anyone responsible anywhere has ever suffered is that the ex-head of the Post Office has given up her OBE.

However many billions of £ of tax payers’ money has gone into, well… where? $37B spunked away on the Covid Test and Trace system which never worked and if it had, wouldn’t have because working people weren’t given the cash to replace the pay they would lose by self-isolating.

I mean, £37B is still considered quite a lot of money, isn’t it? Who trousered it?

Now wonder the electorate have become so cynical about politics.

The people are going to have their revenge tomorrow, though. According to the latest polls, the Conservatives are heading for the worst gut-beating since 1832. I want to see them relegated to 3rd party status, or their shitty shadow front-benchers will be picking up extra pay as the official loyal opposition.

[anothernewbbaccount]

@MikeR

What doesn’t get nearly enough attention is that Horizon was never intended as a point-of-sale application. It was a collaboration between the Post Office and the Benefits Agency (now part of the Department of Work and Pensions) to build a swipe card system for paying out benefits and pensions at Post Office counters.

The project started in 1996 but was cancelled in 1999 because it was so far behind schedule and there were inherent problems with its design. They had spent £700 million by this point, so they bolted on an electronic bookkeeping system and deployed it as the default accounting system in all Post Offices.

Thanks for noting this. Further, as I understand it, because it was ICL (great British hope to compete with the likes of IBM) the govt of the day did not give the Post Office much choice about continuing with a system that was patently not designed for (or fit for) its purpose. As a POS system it was not fit for administering benefits via Post Ofices, and it was (as has been proven) not fit for any of their other business.

@xkot
Yes. That is why it is now front-page news here in the UK. Despite Private Eye writing about it consistently for the past decade or more; it took the TV series to get it on the front pages of the national daily papers here. The enquiry might not be getting quite so much coverage otherwise.

[gatto]

@chenille

Oh, sure, there are probably more elegant alternatives but this is business not art.

to quote sqlrob, not having a function and just typing:

@sqlrob

-d

is generally the preferred method. and self-documenting!

[chenille]

Only if you know that reverses a number’s sign. I have been told that good code should be readable by anyone, regardless of how much they don’t know. (In case you can’t tell, I really hated it.)

[gatto]

it is too bad they didn’t code it in a language where you can override the operators. then -d could have meant multiplying d by itself, or something more useful like that.

[MikeR]

The £37 billion figure is wildly misleading - it was the entire budget over two years, the largest part of which was spent on distributing and processing tasks.

£37 billion was the two-year budget for NHS Test and Trace, not how much was...

The scandal is the PPE procurement that always seemed to end up with friends of ministers benefitting.

[smulder]

@gatto

and self-documenting

… just to avoid any possible confusion, I might put some parentheses around it,  (-d)

@gatto

it is too bad they didn’t code it in a language where you can override the operators

[phuzz]

@MikeR

The scandal is the PPE procurement that always seemed to end up with friends of ministers benefitting.

And Tory peers, don’t forget them too.

[RickMycroft]

I’m sure the contracts for the projects were also readable by anyone, regardless of how much they don’t know.

[mallyboon]

Not quite the same thing, but another colossal failure in the name of neo-liberalism

Phoenix pay system

Though the article says it was “off the shelf”, there were so many bespoke components to it that it bore little resemblance to the original. The crib notes:

• A project that was supposed to save a modest 70 million/year wound up costing an additional 2.2 billion by 2023;
• 80% of public servants’ pay affected
• Government pushing ahead with rollout, despite IBM saying it wasn’t ready
• At least one suicide of an affected government employee; untold numbers of hours lost to stress; ruined credit ratings, personal bankruptcies, loss of savings…

All so the federal civil service could lay off 650 employees (the original stated number; the actual number was more)

[Murgatroyd]

Or even something like -1 * d or 0 - d (assuming you either don’t understand unary minus, or your programming language doesn’t support it). There’s absolutely no reason for a function call here.

[GilbertWham]

Well, quite. Friends is one thing. People who have given the m money is quite another…

[gatto]

@Murgatroyd

There’s absolutely no reason for a function call here.

yeah. paid by the line maybe? ( although maybe greed is indistinguishable from incompetence… and vice versa )

[Doctor_Faustus]

@sqlrob

ETA: How do you get someone that knows d-2*d negates a positive but also doesn’t know it negates a negative

Genuine question from someone who only knows the bare minimum of coding and nothing about actual software engineering: does that matter, considering the if statement only feeds it positive numbers or 0?

For the record, I do understand that the entire function is unnecessary and overly convoluted even if it weren’t