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I'm beginning to think not many of you have worked in a very large defense company where code is audited and certified.

Tools, code snippets, etc are written, tested, undergo a security audit and then certified for use. If MS changes the way something works, Single Sign on for instance, then that code has to be retested and re-certified. There are no Cowboys here and every last change is backed with paperwork and multiple signatures.

We have an infrastructure built up over years that is tightly integrated with the SAP system that runs the entire company, supports government auditing requirements, etc. So when MS goes in and changes stuff, we have to do tons of testing.

It's not just us either. When we we upgraded to IE11, guess what broke...the ADP site where people handle payroll issues.

ADP payroll systems is forcing the use of an ancient version of java and they refuse to fix their broken app.

http://www.adp.com/

Example there are plenty more.
http://ww2.valdosta.edu/helpdesk/news/042611a.shtml

Some payroll system.

If the party is on a Tuesday, then in the middle of their festivities they need to sit still for half and hour while ADP comes in and upgrades the security system.

You're having your payroll processor upgrade your security system? I s'pose that only makes sense in a Microsoft world.

Nobody gets rich writing checks.

ADP does.

I have no idea what California State law is on this issue; but living in California I am getting an ear full, because my wife is a government employee. But as far as the payroll problem is, the solution is fairly straight forward. There are several payroll companies that the Governor could use. All these people would need is a bank account number to draw funds from, and a list of names with social security numbers, amount to pay is already known. These companies will do the tax stuff and get the right IRS numbers done correctly; they have to, it's the state law.

I think I'll go fish'n in the mountains till this all blows over...

Or, even easier, contract with a payroll outsourcing company to provide payroll services, just like huge swaths of private industry do, and stop worrying about paying the ~170 million dollars the article references to upgrade a custom payroll system to a *new* *custom* payroll service that you'll read the same frigging article about 30 years from now, detailing how California can't find Java programmers anymore to upgrade their 100,000 lines of payroll code.

This is not a unique problem for an organization to have. Why would you reinvent the wheel when you could let a company that specializes in payroll outsourcing handle the problem for you at a cost that's probably signifcantly lower than the cost of doing it yourself? I find it terribly hard to believe that the State of California pays people in such a byzantine way that they need to roll their own solution and maintain the entire infrastructure themselves.

According to the 2006 US Census of State Employment, California employed 474,660 full & part time employees. That $177,000,000 referenced as the cost of upgrading could certainly be better spent negotiating a good contract for payroll services. Considering ~22,000 of the people listed in that census fall into the category of "Financial Administration," I bet the outsourcing would also save the state some non-trivial amount of money in the form of salaries that no longer have to be paid, saving the state even more money.

A cursory search using google shows that "small businesses" can expect to pay about $10 to $12 dollars per employee per month for outsourced payroll services. Assuming this is the best rate California could get, that 177 million dollars in upgrade costs would pay for about 2.5 years of service. Consider that they'd undoubtedly get a discount for such a significant volume of business, and the money they'd save by not having to owning, operating, staffing, and supporting their own data centers to perform this function for half a million employees, and I think there's a very good chance that outsourcing their payroll services would be a big money saver for the state.

Of course, this is all based on the (perhaps faulty) premise that any government wants to provide the most fiscally responsible solution to its taxpayers...

Sorry about that!