Well, it isn’t just the cool passwords now…

In this post, I warned about that you have to be nice to the IT folks since they have the "good" passwords (and can kill your business if they misuse them).

Well, now you know that if you don’t maintain your code systems (as in "hey, they work, they’re not broken, so leave them alone" or "it always worked so we never thought about them"), they can turn around and byte you. Especially if there is no one left that knows where the spaghetti code (code that has been changed / modified /played with so often that it is as twisted as a Gordian Knot).

From Slashdot:

"Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a pay cut, to minimum wage of $6.55/hr, for 200,000 state workers — because a state budget hadn’t been approved yet. The state controller, who has opposed the pay cut on principle and legal grounds, now says the pay cut isn’t even feasible because the state’s payroll systems are so antiquated. He says it would take six months to go to minimum wage, and nine months more to restore salaries once a budget is passed. The system is based on COBOL, according to the Sacramento Bee, and the state hasn’t yet found the funds or resources, in ten years of trying, to upgrade it."

The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too.

10 years? Really! With all of the changes, at least at the Federal level, they haven’t had to touch it? Or are they running out of compliance?

COBOL is older (old?) nerd stuff. It works, but not flashy. Nothing that is "Web-by" or elicits a "Wow" factor. It just works in the back office stuff as it was intended to. The problem could be thought of as trying to find a typewriter mechanic – they just don’t stand around on the local corner anymore.

They will be able to find someone, but it will cost them. And with all systems that aren’t maintained, going cheap never is.

Like it? Share it!

http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth Alfred Thompson

There are still a lot of people around who know COBOL. A lot more people learned it in the late 1990s because of the Y2K problem. But they are expensive. But the real problem is that it takes a while to understand a system like that well enough to make big changes to it.
I suspect that they could move everyone down to minimum wage in a matter of weeks but the real problem is making it reversable. For that you’d have to track a whole lot of data that even a more current system is probably not set up for. So you’d need to write a bunch of code to do that recording as a first thing. Since people’s livelyhoods are at stake you’d have to test it very well. The next step, even more complicated, would be to fit that data into the system in a way that would keep things from getting totally messed up. And then there are the timing issues. In a couple of months we’ll have a new year so there are tax implications.
Lastly I doubt the system is completely unchanged in 10 years. Lots of the processes may be table driven and that is easy enough. Other changes may have been modifications rather than backbone changes. So the story is mostly believable.
BTW I “speak” COBOL but haven’t used it in years. No desire to fix California’s problems either.