The Future History of Y2K - Fleshing out the outline
From c.s.year-2000 by jim Rivera; posted on 28 June 1997
You can find the complete posting by searching ww.dejanews.com.
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Jim Rivera:
"This is an attempt to get a handle on what might happen as The Day approaches and passes. Look at it as an outline for a science-fiction story (I have been re-reading some of Heinlein's works recently).
Specifically I am going to outline, roughly and extremely imprecisely,
what the world might look like as we approach The Day. Since this is the Y2K _software_ newsgroup, I am going to discuss the implications of the situation for people like us, software professionals. Note that this is an unashamedly US-centric forecast-it's the only place where I feel confident preparing even a fuzzy forecast.
This is an outline that tracks the following factors:
Overall business activity
Stock market index (Dow Jones or similar)
Number of effective organizations
Demand for software workers
Social chaos index (higher is more chaotic)
Public awareness of the Y2K situation
COBOL programmer pay rate, per hour
This is what I would consider a surprise-free projection, I am going to
assume one good surprise and one bad surprise. The following
assumptions are used in this model:
Denial will persist for a while yet
The US won't get around to fixing things until after the 1998 elections. We get one major bad surprise and one good law will be passed. Some of you may think that this is a mild forecast of the consequences of the Y2K problem. But consider the following points in support of that view:
The economy is strong and unemployment is very low
The budget deficit is low
The national mood is sunny
Our rate of introducing new technology has been good for the past few years Many companies are good at managing change, something that will be very valuable in the near future
As a result I feel that mild optimism is in order.
The projection starts on the fourth quarter of this year, all
parameters except public awareness & programmer rate are normalized to 100. Awareness is always in percent of the whole. The snapshot is taken once at the beginning of each calendar quarter. The COBOL programmer index is really an index for all IT workers in general, it's just that there are more COBOL workers than others so it makes sense to track this rate.
A warning: I am not an economist, I have just read a lot of SF and
history. Some of my numbers are out of a hat. This is a fleshing out
of a severity 4 Y2K crunch. Note there are things in this forecast I
haven't seen elsewhere, so let the games begin.
.... (previous quarters - JM) ...
1998-Q2
Business activity 107
Stock market 102 and unstable
Effective organizations 104
Demand for software workers 175
Social chaos index 105
Public awareness of the Y2K situation 20%
COBOL programmer rate $175
This is the quarter that most people will think of as "the beginning of THOSE interesting times" The overall tone in the US starts to get a little wild. The stock market begins to notice that all is not right with American businesses. Y2K costs and diversion of resources begin to eat into US business profits. Lou Rukeyser devotes a quarter of every program to Y2K issues. CEOs are now panicking. Congress is holding hearings regularly on Y2K. Bill Clinton makes speeches about Y2K.
==
1998-Q3
Business activity 106
Stock market 82 and jittery
Effective organizations 102
Demand for software workers 250
Social chaos index 108
Public awareness of the Y2K situation 45%
COBOL programmer rate $225
... (skipped some quarters; is interesting reading though!)
1999-Q3
Business activity 84
Stock market 62 and watchful
Effective organizations 88
Public awareness of the Y2K situation 98%
Demand for software workers 450
Social chaos index 140
COBOL programmer rate $425
As more and more businesses with non-compliant software get absorbed, the rates for COBOL workers finally stabilize. Some more companies start to say that they are compliant and can prove it. It's a long hot summer in the cities. One large company moves all its IS workers into a motel so that the programmers can enjoy a 100-foot commute to their offices in the next wing with breakfast catered at their desks.
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This scenario goes on until 2001 |
