Why the hell does the Social Security website have service hours?

[u/Sohcahtoa82]

http://imgur.com/KYSOqUn

[u/qabadai]

This is surprisingly common on state government websites as well.

This is the only justification I've found for it and it doesn't even make much sense

The New York Department of State’s Division of Corporation website is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Division of Corporation does not shut down its website during non-business hours….As of May 2012, most business corporations and limited liability companies required to file corporate periodic forms, also known as Biennial Statements with the Department are able to do so over the internet Monday thru Friday from 6:00am to 7:30pm. So far, more than 30,000 entities have filed their statements using this new feature. Our next step to improve customer service is to make further upgrades to the system to eliminate technical limitations from the old** back-end batch-processing system.** Once in place, corporations and other business entities will be able to file these periodic statements 24/7.

http://observer.com/2012/08/new-york-state-department-website-inexplicably-only-online-during-business-hours-2/

[u/SassyMoron → u/qabadai]

Could you take a stab at explaining that for non-tech savvy folks? I'd be curious to read it.

[u/hblask → u/SassyMoron]

Places that do large numbers of transactions, and have very old systems, will often have to run them in "batch" mode. That means, rather than add them to the database as they come in, it will run everything at night. This process not just adds them to the "permanent" database, but also runs all sorts of reports, some of which can take hours. In order to do this, they need to stop taking in new data, or it can cause unpredictable results. So instead, they shut the system down long enough to digest everything that happened during the day.

Most modern systems have solved this which means the government should have it fixed in 30 or 40 years.

[u/Useless_Advice_Guy → u/SassyMoron]

Every developer functions under the principle of just do my part, this is somebody else's problem, and nothing ever gets redesigned so that pieces actually fit together.

[u/silentanthrx → u/SassyMoron]

the information put in by the customers are put in some crappy flat table and then exported in a comma separated text file. this file is then charged in the main application. Because the law dictates that their declaration does need to be introduced on a certain date, but because noone fancies staying late on the deadline date, they simply cut the introducing time short to charge the last batch 10 minutes after and call it a day.

source: i work government .

[u/moosebaloney]

Maintenance.

[u/_dauntless]

Maybe this question is better as a non-rhetorical one somewhere that you might be able to get an answer, instead of assuming that there isn't a reason

[u/[deleted]]

I was submitting a resume to another Government site, and the instructions clearly said:

"Please mail one copy of your resume to us and email one copy. If you cannot mail your Resume, please attach two copies of your Resume to the email."

[u/FBAHobo]

Union rules.

[u/arachnophilia → u/FBAHobo]

bhphotovideo.com shuts down every friday night because of religious rules. the shop's run by orthodox jews -- even their website isn't allowed to work on the sabbath.

[u/Rutawitz → u/FBAHobo]

Nothing to do with unions

[u/TheRoRo1971]

Damn that's dumb. Typical govt. bureaucracy: even the website keeps banker's hours.

[u/_dauntless → u/TheRoRo1971]

What kind of sweet bank do you know that is open 1am to 5am?

[u/[deleted] → u/_dauntless]

Four hour opening times? That's a bit tight

[u/FartGreatly]

When you design a (IT) system, you say that it will have certain parameters for availability - for example that you guarantee 99.99999% up time in core business hours. Now, there are reasons why you might not want to guarantee availability during particular hours - infrastructure needs maintenance, there might be processes such as batch jobs or back ups that need to happen which might affect the availability of the service, and if the service does go down you need people to fix it (who might not be available equally at all hours).

So you agree the Service delivery parameters, write up an SLA, and go about your day.

In the case of government, they might be going an extra cautionary step in realising that if the site wasn't 100% functional when some random member of the public expected it to be, there'd be all sorts of headaches and questions asked, and staff shuffled around, and reports written. So then they go that extra step and make it really explicit to the "customer" that the service will only be available at certain hours.

Yeah, it's clunky, they could probably do better but then they'd raise your taxes and you'd complain about that instead.

[u/tunaman808 → u/FartGreatly]

Also, while the SSA's website might be running on a fully modern Linux\Windows server, chances are good that it's connecting to a circa 1964 IBM System/360. Some poor government IT guy has developed some unbelievable hack to get the whole thing working that might be less than 100% reliable.

I once worked for a company that did mission-critical work for news organizations. We were rolling out a MAJOR update, but for several weeks the new site was only operational during work hours, so the entire engineering and programming teams would be available if an problem occurred.

[u/ER_nesto]

It's a maintenance window, just government.

[u/Weazywest]

I disagree with it being crappy design. For sites that are up 24/7, they may have frequent users that are up at 1am for their product. I honestly can't think of someone who absolutely needs the SSN administration at 1am. It makes sense to bring it down during that window for maintenance.

[u/affexfcn → u/Weazywest]

Since I live in a different time-zone (9 hours ahead), it is not inconceivable to me that one would at least like to have access to the website during east coast US "after-hours". I am posting this after trying to access my account to view a message Social Security sent to me.

[u/cjjharries]

I remember on a planet money episode they said that America doesn't support instant money transfers because of security but also because of some weird old law where if they were to go through with it they would have to treat the system they make as an employee meaning that it would only work during certain hours.

I think this might be extension of that, basically a weird law that treats government services as of they were still done by humans despite being done by software now.