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Technology Stocks : Y2K (Year 2000) Stocks: An Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (9713)	2/25/1998 5:01:00 PM
From: gerald tseng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13949

thanks for the link.

To: Josef Svejk who wrote (9713)	2/25/1998 5:49:00 PM
From: Hoatzin	Respond to of 13949

Year 2000: What? Me worry? by Michael Cohn, Computerworld, 2/25/1998 You may be one of a few hundred thousand people who read this through bloodshot eyes. Your hands shake. Your scalp is bare. You're tense. Depressed. You forget where you live. You are a year 2000 programmer, and your life is hell. Days turn into nights. Bosses hang over you with 40-page Gantt charts. You're a captive of Cobol. A slave to C. And yet there's news, and the news is good: From now on, you don't have to give a damn. You don't have to make your deadlines. You don't have to convert your applications. Your work doesn't have to get finished. Heck, it doesn't even have to be right! Why? You can quit any time. You can hit the door and wave goodbye, with one hand or one finger. Because there are just too many openings. Too many millennium projects desperate, desperate, desperate for people. Leave one job on Tuesday, be coding away Wednesday afternoon. If you can move a mouse, the world is your oyster. Are you a contractor? Consultant? Full-timer? Who cares? There's another job waiting for you. Got a pension? Golden handcuffs? Twenty years with the company? Toss 'em, because you can make them all up on the next signing bonus. Salespeople are signing year 2000 deals hand over fist. They're selling deals they can't staff. They're inking deals they can't start. They want you to be on the next one. So you don't have to be loyal. You don't have to be good. All you have to be is breathing, and that may be negotiable, too. Got a resume? A reference? A pulse? You may be qualified to lead the next project. TWO-WAY STREET Look at it this way: We're never going to get this whole year 2000 thing right anyway. If you fix yours, odds are somebody won't fix theirs. You'll get screwed by some supplier. Some bureaucrat will misplace a million or so lines of Assembler. Some embedded chip will think that every other Thursday is Leap Day. So why not jump ship? Change jobs as often as you change print cartridges. Wouldn't a new project be more fun? By 2000, you can have dropped in on nine or 10. Meet people. See the world -- or at least every insurance company in Connecticut. They'll take you, no questions asked, as long as you use the word "remediate" in your rigorous, 90-second interview. Year 2000 is hard. No one thought YYs would be so tough to find. Or test. Or not test, as is most likely the case if you've got about 30 million of them and you haven't even found half the source code. So to you out there who struggle: Struggle no more. Change jobs. Start again. Screw up a bunch of times. Be blamed no more! No one will complain. No one will care. Because if you think you're in demand now, just wait till Dec. 31, 1999 . . . when most companies will really start their year 2000 projects. Author: Michael Cohn Cohn is a year 2000 programmer in Atlanta. Or at least he has it on his resume.