1. Politics. Funding the IRS sufficiently is, sadly, controversial. Additionally, tax filing is a multi-billion dollar industry, and they lobby politicians very heavily to make it hard to file taxes.
2. The IRS doesn't have everything, it has about 90% of what the average person needs to file taxes. Most people could answer about 5-10 simple questions and the IRS would have everything they need (this is basically how tax filing firms/software get it done after you give them all of the information that the IRS already has). A minority have more complex tax situations, but these people likely already have a personal accountant, or are running a business.
> The IRS doesn't have everything, it has about 90% of what the average person needs to file taxes.
Well, not quite. The IRS knows 100% of what the average person is going to put in their tax return. So just automate that.
There is a small percentage of people with more complex tax situations. Yes, they will need to file a tax return. Percentage-wise, it is very few people.
Your tax office wouldn't automatically know about self employment, investment earnings, your private business expenses, collected rent, profit from reselling things, etc, and they'd expect you to declare them via some form of self-assessment.
The US takes one step further by allowing a plethora of non-earning items to be declared as deductions on your return (mortgage interest, healthcare expenses, kids, etc) which the IRS needs to be told about.
They do know your investment earnings (brokerages report that) and your mortgage interest (loan companies report that) and your kids.
That covers, just about everyone.
Sure, a few people have personal businesses and rent incomes and all kinds of complex things. So the rational thing to do is build an automated system that covers the needs of 99+% of people, and for the few ones that it doesn't work, let them opt out and do a traditional tax return filing.
> At my company, we found that the auto-OAS generation tools were too brittle and didn't communicate enough information, so we actually do write our own OAS and run automation to make sure it's accurate.
I found all OAS spec authoring tooling to be useless toys when building non-trivial real world specs.
The depths of depravity I’m forced to is as follows:
1. Data model in SparxEA because it’s the tool we have in the depths of govt. Generate XSD from tool
2. XSLT to turn the XSD into matching JSON Schema because I’m old and can still remember how.
3. Hand write the OAS with $ref into JSON schema as appropriate
4. Curate sample payloads to be educationally useful
5. Generate CURL and various code samples
6. Bundle it all into approx 80k lines of machine written wondrousness -
7. ReDoc and Mkdocs to build static website with more documentation
All the work is at data modeling, OAS sample curation and mkdocs documentation
Things I wish JSON and Schema had:
1. An equivalent of xs:decimal that JS would use number & double are just plain useless in real world commerce with dollars & cents and bulk item pricing with 3&4 decimal places
2. Has taken the time to fix rfc3399 and give Dates a Timezone suffix. Too many languages Marshall a date into datetime. How many bugs have I seen where it’s broken in the morning and works in the afternoon because the damn server is running in AU with UTC Timezone and we’re in NZ
The 'tyrannical mistake' is to buy us time... We're only at 26% completely vaccinated... Once we've got to >80% vaccinated - around Xmas at current rates - We will have more choices.
We are not trying to stop spread of the disease - we're trying to buy time so can open our country back up on our own terms without killing thousands.
> they basically got cocky. They gambled that their prior infection controls could keep them safe...
And why are we so late to the game? Global supply-chain logistics. NZ govt probably made a choice we would wait 'a little longer' to get Pfizer as it had best efficacy rates at the time of decisions.
We didn't have sufficient supplies of Pfizer until July-2021. Yes we gambled - and we may yet get away without mass illness & deaths. But calling us cocky hints at your lack of understanding how small countries in the world have to take what they're given and say thank you nicely.
Supply chain logistics. US, UK & EU need 2x population doses because they're killing 100,000+ people.
NZ has one decent lockdown and 26 deaths total - and successfully keeps the plague out for 14months.... which rather reduces our govt's negotiating power when trying to source the 10million doses we need. We simply didn't have supply of sufficient vaccines until July-2021.
Don't worry, what passes for right-wing rabid press is tireless in its search for evidence of govt incompetence; so far without success.
The current outbreak and lockdown has concentrated minds and we're managing >60,000 vaccinations per day... At which rate we will run out of supply in late Sept and have to suspend operations until the October shipment arrives. Gotta loved JustInTime logistics.
My OpenAPI spec is 60,000 lines of machine generated goodness. JQ is great for doing non-trivial but useful things.
Eg: Which endpoints are available if you have a specific OAuth Scope?
Most useful jq cli flag is -f. - take the jq script from file
Privacy management.. Privacy laws are severely restricting who may see people’s PII
Are you using the PII data for purposes other than it was originally collected?
Can you synthesise a good enough set of test data so you don’t have to anonymise production data? Hint: you can’t sufficiently anonymise production data and still have it be useful
Yea you can… a uni graduate would take 10 years to reach Architect grade from there it’s just more of the same and layering experience.
You already have much experience to bring to the job.
All devs have to learn new frameworks and tech every five years. You are not as far behind as you think
Your peers are going to be 18 years younger than you. Be gentle with them and you will learn much from each other - you have life skills and experience they can learn…
1. Being a rockstar dev means mgmt will cut you a lot of slack and overlook many sins. By the time you are 30 you will be “both too young and too old”
Too old to continue getting away with that jerk behaviour. Too young to know how to stop being that jerk.
I’ll admit I was a slow learner on that one
2. I had a major medical adventure my first year in uni.. I don’t finish with my bachelors degree until I was 22… the lesson is: progressing through life’s major transitions ( graduate uni, first job; first serious romantic relationship; kids etc..) happens at a different pace for many. It is not a competition to be married and kids on the way by age 28
Lessons learnt in my 50s: Recognise your younger Self in today’s crop of 20 somethings; enjoy their youthful exuberance and cut the jerks the same slack that the 50yo mgmt did to you
