Hi Jeff,
I live in Austin and can give you some explanation. Austin is bursting with technology companies. Traditionaly, people wanted to stay in Austin and would accept lower salaries to do so. Thus, there was a highly educated, technical work force that came cheap. Companies such as IBM, AMD, Samsung, Motorola ect. moved in to take advantage of the situation. Guess what, the demand exceeds the supply now. Thus the state is having the same trouble as everyone else getting technical people.
Most of the people I know at the major industries are on track to complete their year 2000 issues on time with mostly in-house efforts. Smaller companies, of which there are many here, are in a variety of positions withrespect to the y2k issue. My bets are that most will solve their problems, at least to a tolerable level in sufficent time.
The real problem, meaning the people who cannot seem to get their act together is the government, at all levels. This is not very new, they do not have their act together without y2k.
What bothers me about y2k, is not that it is not a problem--it is a problem, but the magnitude of the mythology. We had some work done on our home recently, the workman found out that my wife was a software engineer and began to ask about the y2k problem. He heard that "all hardware would stop functioning. My wife laughed and told him that his hammer would still be operable. She went on to explain the problem in concept. When he left the house, unfortunately, he still believed that all hardware would break at the turn of the century. It seems that people want to believe in disaster!
The government will undoubtedly go into a pannic at some point. They will give money to contractors like me. The system will be patched initally because they will start too late, then later they will pay to have a more complete fix put in. Nothing new. Yes there will be some problems, someone will probably miss their SS check ect. but no disaster, just some govt. confusion....again, nothing new.
Sorry for the length of the post...just my 2 cents.
Steve |
