Y2K Bug: Older Programmers Ready, Willing, but Stable
link: wired.com
by Steve Silberman
3:35pm 20.Jan.98.PST
John Glenn may not be too old to pilot a big bird into space,
but he may have an easier time flying back to his old job than
many of the old-school mainframe programmers being
brought back into the fold to avert disasters caused by the
year 2000 problem.
With demand exploding for programmers fluent in COBOL,
Fortran, and other "legacy languages" to apply fixes to
millions of lines of code, the job outlook for elder mainframe
gurus eager to get their fingers back in the bits has never
looked better. A study published last year by Hunter College
computer-science professor Howard Rubin predicted that
up to 700,000 code-cutters will have to be spliced back into
the workforce in the next three years, and callow
Web-geeks schooled in C++ and Java just don't have the
right stuff.
The problem? Getting the workers to the work.
For an industry that has mushroomed by dangling dad-sized
salaries before unmarried post-adolescents willing to move
anywhere at the drop of an IPO, the Graying of High Tech
presents an intriguing dilemma. The huge financial
institutions that are desperate to get their mainframes on
track for the millennium, says Bill Payson, president of
Senior Staff 2000, a leading database of elder IT workers,
"want full-time people, on-site, in downtown Chicago,
yesterday. But these guys aren't going to live in a motel for
six months. They're living on a golf course in South Florida
or San Diego County, and they're very hard to pry loose.
They moved there because they don't like Chicago - there
are no drugs where they live, and no crime."
Frances Nevarez, president of Automation Training
Specialists - which offers training to programmers for
Y2K-related and other jobs with AT&T, Hewlett-Packard,
and other firms - sees the same problem. The retirees, she
says, "like where they live. They have homes that they set
aside so they could leave the rat race."
It's not that senior programmers don't want to tackle the job,
Payson says. "Thirty-seven percent are interested in the
money," Payson claims (which can vary from US$35 an
hour for grunt-level coding to $150 an hour for top-level
programming), "and 63 percent are bored."
For the generation of technicians who came of age in the
post-WWII era, the 74-year-old Payson - an ex-Marine -
observes, there's also an emotional eagerness to serve:
"They're turned on by a sense of patriotic duty. They want
to save the country's ass."
The task facing "solution providers" hired by the huge
institutions to engage the services of older programmers,
Payson says, is to find innovative ways to move mountains
of code to Mohammed. One possible solution for linking the
ailing mainframes to COBOL-gurus in retirement
communities, Payson suggests, is the Net.
Don Heath, president of the Internet Society, thinks using the
Net and the Web to coordinate Y2K problem-solving teams is
a "great idea." But Heath, who sits on the board of a
company that builds problem-prevention tools for IBM
databases, also acknowledges that many of the older firms
that will be slammed hardest by Y2K glitches - like banks -
are the most skeptical of engaging the expertise of an
off-site, online work pool.
"They're reluctant. For the larger data centers, it's an issue
of style, methodology, operating procedure," Heath says.
"It's ill-founded, but it's based on history as well as inertia."
Steven Laine of Systems Partners - a solution provider with
clients like Intel, Wells Fargo, and Charles Schwab - agrees
with Heath that the typical project manager "wants people
who will be sitting there on site, where they can see them."
As the supply of up-to-speed legacy-language specialists
are snatched up, however, Laine says, "the clients are
going to have to be more flexible."
Another group that has been looking at the Net as a way of
enabling older programmers to get back on the job is
educators. When the University of Santa Cruz Extension
launched a course called "Year 2000 Orientation for
Experienced Programmers" in September, the class filled up
quickly, mostly with jobseekers in the over-50 age group.
Now, says university marketing communications manager
Joselyn Zimardi, UCSC is "looking for a way to take the
course nationwide" - perhaps on the Web, or as a CD-ROM.
If companies can get used to relying on a Net-based pool of
seasoned employees, industry acceptance of senior-age
workers may even outlast the Y2K countdown.
"The Amexes and the Visas are still going after the youth,"
says Frances Nevarez. "But we're talking about
replacements that can cost thousands of dollars per line of
code. Any small business in their right mind would take
experience over education."
The elder programmers, however, may have to learn to be
flexible too, she says. "Instead of living on the golf course
and enjoying life, as we'd like them to, they're going to have
to meet their employers halfway." |
