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California Can't Perform Pay Cut Because of COBOL
beezzie writes "Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered a pay cut, to minimum wage of $6.55/hr, for 200,000 state workers — because a state budget hadn't been approved yet. The state controller, who has opposed the pay cut on principle and legal grounds, now says the pay cut isn't even feasible because the state's payroll systems are so antiquated. He says it would take six months to go to minimum wage, and nine months more to restore salaries once a budget is passed. The system is based on COBOL, according to the Sacramento Bee, and the state hasn't yet found the funds or resources, in ten years of trying, to upgrade it." The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too.
This brings back memories of when we picketed our COBOL professor christmas party with signs of:
"COBOL raises taxes"
we couldn't have been more right
There are plenty of COBOL Programmers out there, the problem is nobody in IT wants to hire old people.
Why would you need a programmer to change people's pay in the system?
Oh, wait; you don't. This is just more politics...
The programmers of California have created the greatest payroll application of all time. You can only raise salaries, not lower them. Ingenious!
If you're going to pull a lame excuse out of your ass for why a decision can't by fulfilled, don't make it known that you're against said decision.
I need a COBOL programmer, who is your daddy and what does he do?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
I have never seen a payroll program that has the wages hardcoded in it... there is no reason that this can't be done... she simply doesn't want to.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
...must have been written their security code in Cobol. No wonder its inevitable.
~psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
...expect minimum wage results.
The problem is not lack of Programmers. The problem is managers who think a developer needs many years of experience with a specific language or technology to be able to work with it. I am sure many programmers would be willing to work on their COBOL systems, but without the required "10 years of experience with COBOL" on their resume, they would never be hired.
From the article: "He [State Controller Chiang] disputes Schwarzenegger's legal interpretation of a 2003 California Supreme Court decision," Chiang is the State Controller, not an attorney. It's not his job to give legal interpretation on Supreme Court decisions. His job is to execute the orders of states executive branch, Gov. Schwarzenegger. It sounds like the Controller is letting his personal beliefs interfere with his professional responsibilities. That's a quick route to unemployment.
A story about firing employees and Ahnold and you didn't use "Terminated"?
I'm not sure whether to be relieved or outraged.
This is a delicious irony here. It's great. It's almost enough to coin a phrase "Don't attribute reprieve from malice to that which can be explained by incompetence."
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
We have about 20 Cobol programmers. We still run CISC and what have you. You can have them. Cheap.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Just Terminate a percentage of those state employees.
OK, no one likes programming in COBOL, but to argue that these systems can't be updated because the language is obsolete is just an all out lie. Plenty of major corporations still use COBOL/CICS because it just works.
If (as someone above stated) a programmer is required to update what should undoubtedly be database fields containing salary information, then it sounds like a problem of implementation, and not one of technology/language of choice.
They created the worst payroll application of all time... it takes 50% longer to raise them back!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Its because of poor coding skills.
Convenient scapegoat there they have.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's a lot easier to just fire them with the software is what they are telling us.
Seriously if California is in a budget crisis how will they pay firefighters and hospital staff? You can pay everyone full wage now and in 10 months stop paying EVERYONE entirely.
In a business with this kind of budget problem you simply lay people off. People who work for the state are up in arms over this, but I've been laid off a number of times. You just fill out your unemployment insurance paperwork and get like 1/4 to 1/2 your salary after a few weeks, and look for a new job in the meantime.
I'm not sure why unions act like every person should be guaranteed a job. What universe you have to live in for things to be so certain?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis." Ummm...... they should have a look at the 30million line codebase I support. I'd love to give _that_ excuse.
I bet this same system has no problem with timely INCREASES in pay rates.
From Wikipedia on California state controller duties:
* As the state's chief fiscal officer, acts as the state's accountant and bookkeeper of all public funds.
* Administers the state payroll system and unclaimed property laws.
* Serves on numerous boards and commissions including the Board of Equalization, the Board of Control, CalPERS and CalSTRS.
* Conducts audits and reviews of state operations.
I posit that he has failed to administer the state payroll system and as such needs to be canned and replaced. Part of administrating the system is making sure it is flexible enough to meet the demands of the California Governor.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
How come the programmers already employed by the state haven't learned COBOL yet? What kind of programmer can't learn a language like COBOL and start figuring out how to fix the system? Why can't they find programmers on the market that are willing to learn COBOL and fix their system?
Sounds like the state has serious IT management problems.
Wow, if this is a COBOL system, you mean no one took the time and energy to document the system and all of its glorious parameters during the ramp-up to Y2K? I'm shocked...SHOCKED to hear that a bureaucracy would waste such a golden opportunity as the Y2K scare to look long-term and decide that hey, as long as we're in the process of vetting code, why don't we document it as well?
And yes, there are already those out there jumping up and down pointing out that fixing a year from a two digit to a four digit format is way different than figuring out how to reprogram an ancient computer language. Gotta love the State Government, home to Silicon Valley, too myopic to even consider upgrading something as non-essential as a payroll system.
This is hilarious! Oh, not for the folks stuck with having to deal with the fall-out, to the rest of the country, OMFG is this funny!
"Work is the curse of the drinking class" Oscar Wilde
They have an application that calculates the salary. They don't need to change anything in the existing application, all they need is to "decorate" the app with an additional wrapper that rolls back the salary the appropriate amount.
Done.
The rate the guy's firing people lately, you'd think they'd nickname him the 'terminator' or something.
Really though - this is a perfect example of modern conservatism: Destroy people's reliance on government by promising anything to be elected, then do absolutely everything you can to destroy everything that government does or provides. Soon, everyone sees politicians only as lying bastards (but still elects those who make the best promises), but no longer sees government as something that can actually help anyone do anything.
The end result is a society that distrusts everyone, and a private sector which can pick off opportunities from an enormous set of basic needs that are being unmet.
Government doesn't even need to be drown in the bathtub - indeed, it might be reborn in a different form if you did that. This way, you get to keep it in a permanant coma, feeding off of everyone's needs and desires and blaming generic government for everything you do.
Ryan Fenton
Let's see, should I allocate sectors, tracks, or cylinders for this post.....
I think the controller is blowing smoke out a major orifice. I am sure that they had no problem getting the minimum pay raised in the system at the last change. What a load of crap.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Sure it *sounds* ridiculous to say you can't lower salaries without a programmer, but I bet it is a fairly complex batch program that has to run. You don't want people hand entering 200,000 payroll changes. If it takes 30 seconds (on average) to do each one by hand, that would be 41 weeks for a person to make all the changes. (assuming a 40 hour work week)
Don't forget, the good governator is probably payed by that system too and you know HIS pay ain't going down.
So, not only is it a HUGE number of data entries AND a complex filter on job classification. ALSO mistakes are something you don't want to make on payroll!
Maybe they should be using one of the many open source payroll applications that exist?
Sourceforge has a few:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=payroll
I suspect the bureaucrat just doesn't want to cut his pal's salaries. I doubt that even a COBOL program has each employee's salary hard coded into the program. If they don't have to reprogram the accounting system every time state employees get a raise, I doubt they really have to reprogram it to lower their salaries.
man COBOL
Something.
I suggest they simply take off and write out checks by hand. It's the only way to be sure.
"COBOL programmers know why women hate periods."
Probably all the pay rates and realated deduction amounts are hard coded in the application. I have seen this lots of times in government.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
First of all, COBOL was still being taught 20-25 years ago so there should still be plenty of CS people around that can do it.
Second, if they can't adjust pay, how do they do raises every year??
JC.
And just because you are in such a bind I will give you a real deal on my services.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
how long it would take, if instead the system was giving him a raise
2 days, tops
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'll give $3 to the first person who can explain to me why on Earth you need to edit the software to change people's salary (Ok, I probably won't give anyone money even if you do come up with a decent reason). Even if they had to individually change each entry, it just doesn't make sense; if you put 100 people (seems like a reasonable number to me) working full time on the project in 6 months you have about 100,000 work hours. So they're trying to say it takes a half hour to change one person's salary? I don't care how antequated the system is, that is unnacceptable.
Somewhere, the current program is storing the salary data in some kind of file. Hire a high school CS student to parse the file, edit it, and save it back. I'm willing to bet a competent programmer could find some solution to this problem within a week. This is just the state controller trying to stick up for his employees; unfortunatly, he's too much of a wuss to do it the legal way and has instead turned to blattant lies that most people are too uninformed to see through.
"A computer without COBOL and FORTRAN is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup or mustard." --John Krueger
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Those of you saying "how hard can it be to write a couple of lines of COBOL" are probably underestimating the problem.
If all they had to do was just lower people's salary to $6.whatever per hour, that wouldn't be the issue. The problem is they have to account for the ACTUAL salary the person should be making, because once the budget is passed they will have to pay all those people back for the salary that's owed.
So, there's a big issue here. They have to calculate their salary like they would anyway, and then pay them minimum wage for the number of hours actually worked (because I'd guess a number of State employees are "exempt"), remember how much they SHOULD have been paid and how much taxes SHOULD have been taken out, record that information, and then print out a check.
In a modern programming language with a modern relational database, no problem. In COBOL with an obsolete non-relational DB, perhaps even one with 80-column mindset? Yeah, right. Good luck with that.
For a measly 10,000,000.00 I guarantee to fix the system so that the 200,000 people's salaries are lowered to the minimum wage within only 15 days. I will restore the original code from a backup tape once it needs to be done in a day or so.
So, Terminator, how about a contract? ;)
You can't handle the truth.
Here's the way I look at it.
Pragma's Rule #1 of life: *never* cost someone more money than it takes for them to get rid of or replace you.
So nobody in their right mind would go through with this if they want to stay employed anywhere in the state. So they've provided an impossible project schedule as an estimate for this task. But hey, they never said it couldn't be done. Its just really hard to do. Game, set, match.
Meanwhile, the State Controller has a mortgage to pay...
BS or not, the State Controller should be commended for defying the Governator.
For Schwarzenegger to deny the rightful wages of thousands of working people is despicable. I'm sickened to see yet another filthy-rich, hopelessly-out-of-touch pol try to screw over the masses simply for the sake of political theatre.
I welcome the shunning of our antiquated COBOL-writing former overlords. Until I want a raise, that is.
Let's assume that everything is stored in a "Big Huge File of Death". Touching the BHFOD is pretty scary, because it was probably not structured well, is binary, and the only documentation for it is the COBOL code. Hacking together some perl code to unpack it and change everyone's salaries then looks a bit scarier. Let's assume that there is no batch change in the system, and there is no way to give people their old salaries back. With the current data entry personnel, it'd be quicker to set everyone to minimum wage, because they'd just go person by person. Setting it back would be harder, because you have to enter different numbers, and there will probably in inflationary raises or other fun things to make it harder.
Or, one could hire a COBOL programmer to add a batch update function that has the ability to reset people to their old salaries. But... it's hard to do that when you can only pay them minimum wage.
Heck, I've written some COBOL and I'm still more than 20 years from retirement age. All they have to do is offer a decent salary. Oops, never mind.
arnold will have to travel back in time to save humanities last COBOL coder... wait, isnt the largest DB vendor in the world based in California?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Here's an interesting tidbit... I am a California U. teacher. Our union fought for and completed a contract last year that called for a series of raises over a four year period.
So far no budget this year and I doubt we're going to see the July 1st raises. I'm already paid about 40% less than industry would and the pay at comparable universities in other areas is better with a much lower cost of living.
Gonna be interesting to see what happens this fall over that.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
I know that sounds absolutely idiotic, but an employee of a major European insurance company explained that exactly that happened to them with a COBOL application.
Hell, with people losing laptops with critical data in the San Francisco Airport, why not?
I just jested with him, and suggested that the programmers probably deleted it on purpose, because they were sick of maintaining the COBOL code.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I haven't studied COBOL in several decades, but I seem to recall that it's a really dreary language to work in. I knew one woman who was working as a webmaster, but who claimed to be an expert COBOL programmer. This was in 1998, when everybody was desperately updating their COBOL code in anticipation of Y2K. I asked her why she wasn't out raking it in as a COBOL consultant; she replied that she hated working with the language.
I can code in COBOL. It seems unlikely, however, that Califorina can afford my fee.
www.wavefront-av.com
Bet you it is. In which case someone can hack in and change it for them. Of course it means the hacker could change them down to the minimum wage (pissing off the workers) or move them a little further up (pissing off the government) either way, no one can change it back! Oh and of course the third option- change the wages to 1 cent below minimum wage, it'll piss off the workers, and it'll screw the government too. :P
this story reminds me of the Star Trek NG episode where they come across a ship of idiots who need help fixing their ship
During 3004-2005 while I was unemployed in California. I tried avery technical skill I had. COBOL was one of them.
I bet, if the talk was about pay increases, everything would've gone very smooth...
In fact, I'm fairly certain, they have already done a number of pay-increasing code-modifications since the last Cobol-book was published.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's a funny story, but I think it's unfair to blame COBOL. After all, the state payroll system was probably written by state employees, and if you were writing a program that controlled your own salary, what sort of "features" and coding practices might you use?
Sorry.
What did governments do before computers? They had PEOPLE who sat at DESKS that used TYPEWRITERS or PAPER and PEN.
If they want to do it, they could. You just sit people down, write checks out by hand and give them to people (obviously recording the checks in a ummm...ledger)
Reliance on government? Overbloated bureaucracies? Unionized officials? How much mercury did you drink before you started to think that those are good things? Having 500,000 people on a payroll (paid by me!) doing the jobs of 50,000 people is a Bad Thing. The original intent of the plan was to get a balanced budget out of the multitudes of bureaus, but if the effect becomes a "DBCC SHRINKDATABASE (GOVERNMENT)" then I say "Well done, Mr Governor"
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I kid you not about this: when I worked in the Los Angeles County Health System, I was paid by both the county and the state bursars. The paperwork for my job stated specifically that I was required to carry out my job EVEN IF THERE WERE NO FUNDS AVAILABLE TO BE DISBURSED TO ME FOR MY PAYCHECK. I have that document somewhere in my vertical archaeological dig of paperwork from the prior century.
I pointed this out to the H.R. person after my employment physical, and she told me "Honey, don't worry about it, the state don't run out of money." I respectfully disagreed, crossed out the line, initialed it, and signed the paperwork. Nobody gave me any trouble, but if this happened nowadays, I bet they wouldn't let me in with that line crossed out.
Don't even get me started about the payroll records and timecard abuse: the department secretary always told me to sign the blank timecard and she would fill it out: I refused to sign it unless I also filled out my hours. When I put in more than forty, she said, "Oh no, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it," or something equivalent to that.
I never saw timecards again from the department.
if they could reprogram the payroll to cut state worker salaries to minimum wage. Um, I think I see the problem.
Wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense to stop paying the legislature instead?
http://www.semdesigns.com/Products/Services/MainframeMigration.html
But then you will still need to deal with legacy algorithms.
Arnold also is proposing a temporary 1% increase
in sales taxes:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/BA2212523E.DTL
I bet there won't be any programming problems stopping this.
Since the pay cut is just a way to postpone payments until the budget is passed, the system system needs to issue back pay after the crisis. It's entirely plausible that issuing back pay is more complicated than implementing the pay cut.
It seems that California has a similar budget crisis every single year. Back in 1992 they issued IOUs.
How about this for an idea - open source the code - I'm sure they'll find some pro-government coders out there willing to spend the 6-8hrs (max) that's probably required to write a routine to achieve this. Everyone likes a challenge :)
That's even cheaper than minimum wage.
that is the lamest excuse I've ever heard. How about they fire all 200,000 workers instead? CA could finally be on the track of having a reasonable budget.
I never understand stories like this. I'm a programmer, and I'm reasonably certain that with the aid of a good book and a short amount of time, I could most likely transition to any language that follows the basic rules of logic languages are built upon. If it's got variables, documented syntax, IO, and flow control you are pretty much good to go. Can't they find anyone out there who can read?
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
01 Governator PIC 999999V99 VALUE 212179.00 .
01 Everyone_else PIC 9V99 VALUE 6.55 .
(Okay it's been 20 years since I even looked at COBOL, so be nice)
#DeleteChrome
Which of the following classifies your state as third world: A) When the state government can not meet it's obligations to pay it's workers the full wage (hey, just what you need when your house value has dropped 40% and you're going to miss a mortgage payment!). B) You have a COBOL system in place to do your state payroll. C) You have a minimum wage of $6.55 (or $8) when many other 1st world countries have a minimum wage twice that. D) You elect someone who's brain (and likely testes) were damaged by steroid use to lead your state. E) All of the above.
I'm only 34 and I know COBOL
COBOL was the first language I learned in college after playing with BASIC as a youth.
State of California Officials - Call me! Lets talk about fixing your COBOL problem and start planning an upgrade path! SAP, perhaps!?!
"Lame" - Galaxar
First, software that cannot handle pay changes (unless the state controller just makes this up, as some posters suggested)
Second, cutting pay for all employees. Even if it is legal to do, that's a good reason for those with more marketable skills to leave.
Third, that an update will cost $177 million (from TFA) and has been tried for a decade. I find it difficult to imagine the problem can be THAT complex.
C - the footgun of programming languages
California needs more IBM Blade Servers! Or Women that aren't leather-skinned sticks with hair out of a bottle of Bleach.
"Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code"
If that's all, what's the fuss about? In 10 years, a single programmer with zero experience could write you a half-decent system in a modern language to replace your 90,000 line system. Why did nobody do this?
California Can't Perform Pay Cut Because of COBOL
This is horrible! That dang COBOL makes it so hard to do anything. Really, those COBOL programmers were genius to be able to do anything with those systems.
These days, we'd do it with Ruby on Rails! I could do it in a week!
Of course, management will say "Quick, time to spend $100,000,000 to upgrade to Oracle Financials and Oracle HR! It can be implmeneted in 28 months!"
Sarcastically,
AC
The article quotes a consultant on how hard it is to find COBOL programmers; he says you usually have to draw them out of retirement. Problem is, if there were any such folks on the employment rolls in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger fired them all last week, too.
thats what happens when you vote a musclehead into power. all these years of steroid usage has to have a cumulative effect.
Read radical news here
Having just gone through the process of getting a replacement payroll check from the state I ALMOST believe the story here. The system is REALLY bad. I had to fax information to 3 different departments then mail a hand written letter in. After that it took them almost 2 months to get a new check to me. Thing is it wasn't a check. They won't mail checks. It had no routing or account number on it. Just a phone number for the bank to call. The bank looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. Took another three days for them to confirm it was a real check and cash it. Now why do I have checks still? Why no auto deposit? Perhaps because they refuse to add lower level employees to auto deposit because they claim their system can't handle that many auto deposits.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
You're forgetting that California has the largest and most entrenched public servant power structure in the nation, nay perhaps the world, excepting France and the former Soviet Union. An interlocking system of unions enjoying sweetheart deals and special protected legal status, dispensed by a legislature beholden to their fundraising and vote-organizing prowess, gerrymandering, the weak coherence of the state in general and its unusually transient population, all lead to this hideous cancerous mockery of government. In this case, the Controller is a partisan elected position, and the Governor has no power to fire him. Practically speaking, the Controllership is a parking spot for future candidates for higher office (like governor) who have lost election to lower office, or are termed out of it, to stay in the public eye, typically by picking fights with the current governor, which of course is exactly what's going on here. Nice that we, the taxpayers of California, get to pay for all this political theater disguised as governing, huh? Blech.
Believe me, we've tried to cut the monster down to size. There's a reason for the periodic citizen revolts, including Prop 13 (property tax reform), term limits (evaded now by a weird revolving flow of public "servants" from local to state level and back), and, most recently, by recalling Gray Davis and installing the Governator, who we foolishly imagined could take a machete to the tumor that is Sacramento and get it off our backs, or at least chastize it into actually doing some useful work in return for the huge amounts of cash it loots from our wallets.
This budget crisis is just the latest round of the perennial budget circus brought about by California's insanely "progressive" tax code, under which the majority of citizens pay zero, and the budget rests on the prosperity of the top 150,000 California earners. When they have a mildly bad year, income-wise, the state's revenues plummet, and when they do a little better, the state's revenues soar. Not surprisingly, California swings wildly between huge surpluses, when they generously endow billion-dollar research institutes and pass out generous pay raises to prison guards and teachers -- the average California teacher earns over $70,000 -- and awful deficits, during which you get, well, this nonsense.
Personally, I'd sign a petitition to simply abolish California's state government, which is utterly beyond hope, and subdivide the state into two (or more) polities, each of which could hold constitutional conventions and try again.
Here's the deal. If you can go get 40% more money working for someone else, if you are that underpaid, why not go work for them? I think that we know that the answer is that 40% less than what "industry would pay" is really a mythical figure, and your day is not so bad after all. After all, if you have to have a union to get higher wages, it means that by definition you -can't- get them from somewhere else.
This is my sig.
While it's been nearly 5 years since I toiled in COBOL, I can assure you that much of the information infastructure you deal with on a daily basis still runs on legacy mainframe hardware with COBOL programs being fed your charge card data, airline reservations, utility usage, pharmaceutical claim adjudications, etc....
True. Or the "hire" would be at a rate of 50-60% of what that same programmer made previously. I still get soliciations for mainframe COBOL work and the rates and salaries advertised to me are an absolute joke.
Well, code is code, but I would caution that:
Most of the Y2K effort focused simply on alleviating eventual issues with two digit dates by "windowing". No expansion of existing database fields -- as much of the processing in legacy world on a fixed column basis, and lengthening the field was considered "out of scope" -- just a simple if statement to test if it was the 20th or 21st century. And regarding documentation, you're being glib, right? As staffs are downsized, support and application teams siphoned off to India or replaced by imported non-immigrant visa holders, documentation, which never was a top priority, has been given even shorter shrift.
A rather naive assertion. In legacy systems much of the business logic is embedded deep within the bowels of the code. There may be a "business analyst" who is the overseer, but they are totally reliant on somebody else who can actually read code. And it will be far from straightforward, even for a gifted wizard, as the code in question may be decades old, and littered with patches and interfaces placed on top of all the cruft.
AZspot
I have replaced antiquated systems with hard coding throughout. Hmmm... Let's see, the last time was last September... I believe I used this obsolete idea called regular expressions to get the job done. Some types call that sort of functionality search and replace. Hey! Isn't that what they do to programmers??? Search and replace...
I wonder how hard it would be for a guy like me who has programmed in several languages but has never seen a line of COBOL in his life to grep around the code and find the place that needs to be updated and rebuild? Is COBOL really that difficult to learn?
In that case the US Government should fire everyone, since we're 9.5 trillion in the hole. The deficit spending popularized by Reagan, which cut out social programs, raised military spending, and lowered taxes for the wealthy, is just one of the internally flawed principles that passes as economic policy under "conservative" government.
An appropriate response would be to cut spending across the board, and probably reduce the trillion or so dollars a year we spend on military research and wars, which would be around 100 billion if in line with what the rest of the world spends. Instead, we've more than doubled our military spending since 2001, and our currency has steadily declined because of our refusal to address this very basic issue.
America has enormous wealth, but it's currently being squandered by the same chickenhawks who increased the deficit in the 80s with military spending, saber rattling, and tax cuts for the wealthy. Their names might sound familiar: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
(Just because you don't like the source doesn't mean the numbers aren't real.)
I smell a Microsoftie - Get him boys!
...and will only hand them over to the governor. Seriously though, if you can blame a network guy for poor management and get away with it, why not blame a COBOL guy when violating your oath of office. The majority of voters in California aren't computer literate, hell, they aren't even English literate. If ballots are printed in every language so you don't have to educate yourself, why would you bother?
I am sure it isn't thru a code change.
Of course this assumes they get raises at all....
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If that payroll system is so seriously out of control, I would run plain paper through the check printers and glean the required details off the pay stub portion and manually adjust and write each check by hand.
I am sure that the controller will soon come up with a way that is more economical than having to all 137,000 checks by hand. (I don't even want to think of the writers cramps or RSI, even when using a rubber stamp for the signature.)
If this controller is still on the payroll after this fiasco, then he can use the original plain paper check (with notes of check adjustments) to track the amounts still owed to each pensioner.
The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
America sucks huge terrorist balls!!!!!
A COBOL-savvy man suffers from a deadly disease and decides to go for cryonics, hoping they will find a cure in the future. A hundred years from now they wake him up. He's relieved and asks: "Thank god, you've found a cure." - "No", they tell him, "we're short of COBOL programmers."
from the to-stupid-for-words dept.
what about the CHILDREN!?!?!
It is because they already laid off the contents of the Working Storage section.
OK - I'll get my coat [ dodges thrown tomato ]
One of Scott Adams's newsletters reported this exchange between a headhunter and an applicant a while back:
"Why do you want to leave your present job?"
"My boss wants me to become a COBOL programmer."
"So, you don't like to learn new things?"
rj
Step 1: Dump current data on pay rates and pay grades for all exployees for backup
Step 2: Change all employees to a light industrial pay grade and their hourly rate to minimum wage
Step 3: Print paychecks
It would still probably be a week or two of work, but not the months and months that they are claiming.
I know plenty of people with damn near zero experience in anything who have jobs with web 2.0 type companies. In certain market segments, especially web 2.0 and even more especially social networking, having anything at all that you can sell yourself as is enough to get in the door, because they're so desperate to hire people. Know a little CSS design, maybe can sell yourself as having done some amateur social-network analysis, and can write a PHP script? Sold!
I exaggerate only slightly. Especially in the SF Bay Area, the fact that Google has hired ten thousand people in the past year alone has really put a drain on the availability, to the extent that most other companies will hire anyone they can in good conscience justify as "probably not terrible".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Ditto, I'm 37 and took two COBOL classes at my university to get my CIS degree. Count me out on the minimum wage to repair the issue though!
I've written payroll systems before.
The thing is, the hourly minimum wage is a very simple payroll case. All you have to do is copy the original worker master file, then, you go and generate a new one from the original, but, just give everyone the same exact record. I'm sure that there's someone in the original file that has a low hourly rate that you could use as a template.
It's utterly ridiculous, and, if anything, that the controller of California cannot actually resolve this issue in a timely fashion suggests to me that he and everyone who works beneath him SHOULD be paid minimum wage.
This is my sig.
Just switch the whole thing over to Ceridian, or one of the other payroll firms, and be done with it. The bonus is that you get a new room for a staff lounge, and the gutted equipment racks make nice coat closets.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The Federal Government will just bail out the whole state! 42!
I'm only 33 and I know COBOL. As a matter of fact, that's what I've been doing all day today: writing COBOL (except stopping to read slashdot during lunch)
So California, call me! (You don't really want to hire that old guy above, do you?)
Most COBOL applications can be thought of as traditional 3 tier applications that rely heavily on syntax for progress through the application.
Most of the business logic is addressed through conditional statements like those in pascal or C. IF, THEN, GO TO, all those sorts of constructs are in traditional COBOL applications.
Most of the presentation layer is controlled by data fields, like modern form fields, and input control is achieved through the use of semicolons. Lots and lots of semicolons.
Most of the data access logic is... well, it's done a number of ways depending if we are dealing with a mainframe or a flat file database.
I think, if they offered 10 smart developers a 2 week course in COBOL, this could be done in 4 weeks.
M
"We don't really want to (and we're not really sure where the source code is)"
I know plenty of COBOL programmers - if the state of California can't find any, they must not be looking very hard.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Are you sure they weren't terminated?
(Couldn't Resist)
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Sorry, they already have a budget crisis.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
COBOL: I'm sorry T-800, I'm afraid I can't do that. ... ... ...faded away
T-800: Where the ____'d you get that idea, COBOL?
COBOL: T-800, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
So the Terminator prayed, ...
"Lords of COBOL, hear my plea"
Obviously this is more complicated than the article has dumbed it down to be. There are quite a bit of unknowns that probably come into play. First, the system probably has very limited or no way at all to handle the back pay portion. That alone could take a little bit of time and nobody would say they could add something like that to a state wide payroll system the size of CA in a few weeks. Next, you need to try to figure out how to handle peoples 401k contributions, health insurance, healtch savings account deductions and probably at least a few other as well. What happens when peoples salaries no longer cover their health care monthly deduction? It'll take weeks/months for them to even figure out all the possible ramifications, let alone get a spec written.
I really think that this is a case of some inadequate reporting. We have to assume this is not as simple as we are led to believe. That being said, I think he is definately using some scare tactics, but I don't think we have all the information either.
The Governator is hardly a conservative last I checked.
Let's not ignore the circumstances here -- the Governor has directed this move as a political stunt in an attempt to force the Democratic legislature to agree to his proposed budget. Harming every day California State workers by lowering their salaries to minimum wage is a cheap trick and a disgraceful attempt to win political points.
Suppose replacing salaries is a trivial programming task. Would you accept a job to change everyone's salary to minimum wage? Including yourself? What the State Controller is doing is in the best tradition of civil disobediance. He is an elected official answering to over 12 million California votes.
He believes he has been issued a direct order by another elected official that he believes is illegal. Rather than trigger a constitutional crisis by outright refusing to follow the order, he's taken the very principle stand that it is impossible *cough* to enter these changes in a timely manner. Lowering salaries may not quite be the equivalent of committing a war crime -- but I don't see the "just following orders" excuse as valid. The Controller's sole constitutional reason for being is to manage the finances of the State, including the payroll system.
Like government or not -- you do not improve government services by vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. The governor may not suffer if he doesn't receive a weekly paycheck, but I guarantee you that lots of others will. That's why what the Controller is doing is laudable -- even if it stretches credulity on the programming end.
You are forgetting that in an old COBOL system like this, hundreds of other modifications have already been made using the "decorator pattern". It becomes difficult to figure out which lines of code, and possibly even which tables in the database are in active use. Changing everyones salary in the salary table may have no effect, because someone may already be using the "decorator pattern" to automatically generate the salary table. There may be so many rules and exceptions, that no one clearly understands them all.
Writing a short program to make a wholesale change only works if the underlying system is simple enough that the consequences of the wholesale change can be accurately predicted. When you are dealing with payroll, you have to get it right. You don't want to suddenly start paying obscure part-time staff full-time hours. Even at minimum wage, you still have to pay overtime. This all must be done in reference to the appropriate union contracts, precedents, and the relevant tax and labor laws. These are complex laws.
You might even need a team of tax and labor lawyers to figure out the tax and labor law ramifications of your wage changes, so the wage change comes into effect in a legal and proper manner. In the end, this just isn't simple.
... to get the system to issue payroll checks at a $6.55/hr amount, including doing the correct calculation based on reported hours, including the 1.5x factor for overtime, do all the correct tax calculations, generate all the reports like what goes to the IRS, print the checks ... while keeping (but ignoring, for now) the original pay rates in the database. This change in logic would require probably several hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of computer code in hundreds of modules, just to be sure everything got processed in exactly the correct way uniformly everywhere. And then there is testing. A lot of testing is needed to make sure there no parts of the system were overlooked, and each changed part was done correctly.
You might think it is as simple as changing "MULTIPLY HOURS-WORKED BY PAY-RATE GIVING GROSS-PAY." with "MULTIPLY HOURS-WORKED BY 655 GIVING GROSS-PAY." but I can assure you it is far, far, more complex than that.
Alternatives that are also unworkable for a quick change include literally changing all the pay rates in the database, then changing them back again later. Substituting a temporary database is also unlikely because this is likely a massive database that contains far more than just names, SSNs, and pay rates.
And are they even sure they have all the source code to all the modules in the system? Do they even have the machine capacity to do several dozen payroll runs in just a couple weeks time just to complete the testing?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
- calculating holiday pay
- pay stud deductions (for example wage garnishing)
- pension contributions, etc.
Nobody wants their paycheck messed up as it creates financial distress and plus people lose confidence in the payroll system. So I would assume there would be considerable time spent testing these changes too.
Couldn't they just find the final output routine, leaving everything untouched, and add this?
final_salary := (final_salary * 0) + 6.55;
I don't know COBOL, and never will, so translate as appropriate.
No need to understand the byzantine labour code/payscale logic in the existing app, just add a post-processing stage. Of course this would only be applicable for the class of workers meant to be rolled back, which is probably just as big a problem as modifying the salary itself.
Well, I work here I am affected by this threat of minimum wage. Bleh.
I can tell you the problem is this. They don't want to preserve or change the current system. "sure continued changes COULD be done to the old one.. but why?"
They NEED a new one. The old one has served its purpose. Now take the payroll program and multiply by 100.
That is how many of these programs and problems we have out there. I have a 15 year old sign program. It's sole purpose is to manipulate those fancy signs you see on the freeway. "slow down.. amber alert etc" This program was created by a student who left a few years later. Of course said student took the source with him and we've been stuck for 13 years making this dos program work on the varying versions of windows.
Now a program can be purchased for 30K "per district x12" that would let us control these older sign controllers as well as the new signs.
We can't buy it. It is never a priority to replace an OLD program that still sort of functions. In fact it's usually at the bottom of the needs/wants list. yet the state spends 2million to put CMS's "changeable message signs" every half mile in a fog area.
This is roughly the same problem the controller runs into. He can use the old system. It doesn't matter who the controller is, When Davis tried to do the same thing the problem existed then. The system was not created for making these type of payroll changes. We don't hire cobol programmers. Heck we really don't have anyone coding programs any more. It's all web-dev and off the shelf applications. Guess what? We're in a hiring freeze as well. So it's not like we could hire anyone to do it anyways!
So if you want to work for free and offer your expertise we do allow that. But if you want to keep all the source then no-thanks!
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
This is nothing more than the bureaucracy letting the governor know who runs Bartertown. You can bet the system could be made to work if everyone was getting a raise.
alias 'please'='sudo'
I don't think that the real problem is changing everyone's pay rate to minimum wage is the issue.
The real problem is having the system remember the OLD payrate and then turn around and refund the lost wages once the budget is signed. It wouldn't surprise me if the system was not developed to handle that.
On the other hand, I think that the timeframe that he is giving is a mixture of real issue cost in time x bullshit modifier.
Why should it take any time at all to undo - Backup the source before you change it. Restore it when needed.
(Or write it in a reasonable way so all you have to do is put back the data files)
Pay rates are going to be defined in a database. A backup of the pay rates table and a simple replacement of all pay rates to 6.55 is all that is needed. When the budget passes you can restore the old rates.
My guess is that they are taking the advice of a bunch of head hunters searching for "COBOL" in their list of resumes, and assuming that if you have a few years of programming experience in another language that you can't possibility learn another. SAP (ABAP/4) is also based on COBOL, so you might even look towards gathering some newer SAP programmers.
bwhahahaha
People who argue this issue has a simple solution are code rookies and have no idea of the complexities involved with large enterprise systems. They are basing their responses on a few primary mistakes:
The ability to watch a screencast, install Ruby on Rails, and script a blog in a few hours is not equal to working on a complex legacy system.
The ability to conceive of a simple answer is not equal to understanding a complex problem.
The ability to access contemporary technologies does not mean that programmers from 30 years ago know less, were stupid, and failed to realize the choices and tradeoffs they faced.
The best programmers I have ever met are from the pre-PC days when they had to work through the complex issues of performance, data storage and memory allocation. Although now retired, many remain smart, resourceful, and reflect the best engineering skills our country has ever seen.
I've written in COBOL. It's not a language I'd like to use a lot. It's not hard to learn, though.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
They will do the jobs that no American will. Picking fruit, writing COBOL....
Whereas The government is too busy bickering with themselves to do their job.
Whereas The people of the state are harmed by the lack of a budget year after year.
We Propose that if a budget is not completed by the deadline, the previous budget is automatically re-enacted except Each legislator and the Governor get a 5% pay cut. During the period of the next two years the legislators may not raise their own pay.
They (the legislators)may only raise their pay again with the second budget they enact on time.
And holding out on a proposed budget long after it's over-due because it doesn't include your particular bit of pork is, what exactly?
Sounds to me like the difference between "cheap trick" and "moral stand" depends on which side of the issue the observer is on.
Oh, and never mind that all non-salaried California state contract employees have their salaries lowered to ZERO, automatically, until the budget is passed. I bet they don't feel too bad for the salaried employees who are "only" going to get paid minimum-wage until the contract is agreed to.
Yes.
Civil disobedience doesn't include lying under oath to your boss. Unless he admits it's possible, but refuses to do so, you have NO point at all.
As opposed to the Governor...
If he believes, as he's said, that his interpretation of the court ruling does not allow what the Governor is asking, he's welcome to go to court with his concerns, just as every other affected employee is. I don't see a constitutional crisis.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
poor scapegoating skills?
Arnold : I need you all to change all the salaries to minimum wage, yours included.
Datacenter Employee #7: Umm... sir, we can't. The code is all in COBOL and can't be changed.
Arnold: Wait here. I will go find COBOL programmers.
Simply change anything that looks like a dollar amount to 6.55
If one of those was the gov annual salary or something, it's ok, better to cast the net wide nowdays than let anyone slip thru ;)
for the first time in my life, I can honestly say "Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for COBOL!"
/employed at a California state-run institution of higher learning.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
25+ years of COBOL, multiple dialects. Pay me what I'm worth, I'll take a vacation from here to do the job. What's the database, if their is one? IDMS, IDS-II? VSAM files? ISAM files? I've done them all, no problem.
The problem is california is broke, all the other states are broke, the federal government is broke, for all practical purposes now the nation is broke, the rest of the planet knows this and it is only a matter of time now before they start moving away from the FRN en masse. The money doesn't exist to pay all those governmental workers salaries then fat pensions that are coming soon, nor pay for the day to day business, entitlements from government and private sector pensions and for all the boomers to cash out and want to be selling their stocks sitting in 401ks and so on etc without huge massive and relatively fast inflation, like you are starting to see as they bail out the big investment banks and let them gobble up the smaller banks with newly created cash by the shipload. Then those dollars will be worth less and less until it is beyond a joke. Playing short term games with number juggling and so on is no sort of fix for this looming and crisis level set of overlapping problems.
You are in the beginning of the worlds largest ever transfer of real wealth upstream into fewer hands, even as the FRN credit based economy crashes. What will come out of it I am not sure, but they'll be a lot less personal sovereignty and state and local government sovereignty, because they'll be forced to borrow their way into perpetual economic serfdom in order to meet obligations. And they borrow money by just creating it. Foreign money used to buy government paper is just borrowing against the future again, and that has been drying up fast, they want the real stuff, the buildings and land and corporations and so on now or no dice. They don't want any more IOUs. And I don't blame them, no one has any "faith" in the US and the "credit" is beyond overextended. And that is what allegedly backs the dollar "faith and credit". It is a non intelligently designed faith based economic system, it is insane, quite insane. They might as well call it the flat earth economy.
Snooze you lose. You can either recognize every single thing these economic government "authorities" have said over the last two years has been minimalized and trivialized on purpose to avoid widespread chaos and panic, or you can't see it or just can't handle seeing it so you live in denial and just refuse to see it because admitting reality is just too scary to contemplate.
It's not a subprime crisis, it is the entire borrow against the future crisis, all of it, everything, it's tapped out, they are borrowed two generations ahead by now. This isn't fixable. Even a general default wouldn't fix it because that still leaves a nation to pay for, and it just isn't there.
Here's my understanding of the issue: Schwarzenegger wants a temporary paycut for all 200,00 employees. He wants to set all their wages to minimum. State Controller says the change could take many, many months to make the change and reverse it.
Most people here are calling the controller a liar saying it can't possibly take that long. After all, people get salary adjustments everyday. Here is the problem: There are two ways to change their salaries: Manually and programmatically. Changing one persons' pay is easy because it is a manual change. Changing all 200,000 government workers is harder. You can either manually change all 200,000 people or change it in the code. The State Controller says the code is so old that this will be a problem. (1) No one really knows the business logic. (2) No one knows the code (COBOL) even if they knew the business logic.
Now, I don't know if it's gonna take 15 months to do, but I would outright call the controller a liar without know the underlying details.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Wonder why they can't find any Cobol programmer? There are probably Cobol programmers on the state payroll maintaining this system, but do you want to modify a computer program, so your employer can cut your pay by 75%? Didn't think so.
Maybe one of you bright guys can tell me why a COBOL programmer is required to change the pay rate for anyone. Are they saying that the pay rates were hard coded into the system? That just doesn't make any sense. Why would any programmer do thatâ"any?
Someone is not telling the truth or California is hiring very, very poor programmers. Sounds like now is the time to bring in an off the shelf solution. It can probably be payed for with firing the rest of the programmers employed by the state. If this is an example of California hiring for coders, then they (and their HR department as well as the management) should be fired anyway.
Isn't it what they program rotary phones with?
I'll bet you a donut to your paycheck that if the legislature passed a resolution that the shortfall would come out of that person's budget until it was resolved, you would start hearing about solutions instead of excuses.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Let's not ignore the rest of the circumstances here -- the Governor is acting on a 2003 California Supreme Court decision (though it is an interpretation of that decision). Another fact is that this is not a pay cut. It is just the amount to be paid for now. Other states that have faced this situation have had to simply not pay anyone at all (effectively furloughing all state workers). Even the Federal government has had this issue. So I'm guessing that the California Supreme Court decision is saying that not paying at all, or furloughing as a means to not pay, is not an option, and that a minimum wage still has to be paid for now, for anyone still on the job.
Then there is the complication that the difference between what people should have been paid, and what they do get paid (minimum wage), be paid back later once the budget is approved and passes. That kind of logic is apparently not yet coded into the payroll system. The problem is more a case that the state has not budgeted to the state IT department the resources to implement, test, and deploy, a system the California Supreme Court decision may require under existing laws (or better yet, upgrade it to an all new system in a modern language on modern computers ... such as Java or Python running on Linux or Solaris).
This is NOT lowering salaries/wages ... it is just paying them a minimum amount now for staying on the job, and the difference later once the budget becomes law.
This is NOT "vindictively striking out at rank and file workers" ... it is trying to make sure they are paid something for now, rather than nothing at all, or the possibility of them not even working (time for which they then would never be paid).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Ha, get me a link to a perl module for accessing an IMS database!
Forrer said the system has tens of thousands of lines of code, so it is time-consuming to find and replace salaries for each job classification on an individual basis.
Why is the pay written directly into the code?
I am actually a COBOL programmer (fresh out of college - 2 years ago) and I know quite a few others (1 who just graduated a few months ago who is now a COBOL programmer with us).
.Net/Perl/VB6/Python just off the top of my head, a few of those few, can manage to write somewhat decent 3d visual programs).
My previous job last year was also COBOL. It's more common than you think, although I admit half of the people you find out there are definitely NOT technical, but a few are still up to date (me and a few others do program in C++
Sure, I hate the language for its lack of object orientation, but despite the Slashdot following: it isn't bad pay, and they can be found. I'm sure the rumors about COBOL programmers is more about job security, and that's a positive thing I can see about it.
-AC for obvious anti-pitchfork wielding reasons.
We still teach it at my local community college - it is a required part of our programming degree; RPG too. Still taught at the public university too. Don't know about the private ones.
Seems at least one or two 3 credit classes wouldn't hurt when there's still plenty of old COBOL running in business. The same could be said of dBASE and AS/400 apps too - we teach AS/400, but not dBASE. The course planners must have to decide which legacy tech to teach.
Incidentally - I finally created a Slashdot account after 5 years of reading and occasional AC posts - I hate having to name things
Most of the developers out there today learned using an object oriented programming model and a language such as Java (or for older people, C++ and others). This throws up an impediment to learning COBOL.
You see, COBOL is all coded procedurally. There is no such thing as an object. Additionally, there is no IDE to even compare to what's available for modern OOP.
Now, if this code is very old like it sounds from TFA, then not only is the code procedural, it is UNSTRUCTURED procedural. This means GOTO statements, loops without control structures, in general what used to be called "spaghetti code".
I am a bit of an anomaly, being a 44 year old who can develop in COBOL (5 years exposure to legacy systems early in my career). No IT person who leaned using Java or another OOP stands a CHANCE learning such an alien coding paradigm. Such a person would choke the first time they had to trap an error on a disk read or display information on a 3270 dumb terminal's screen.
If he wants to disobey an illegal order, as far as I'm concerned he should do it on those grounds instead of using software as a made-up excuse; I'd like to be able to expect my elected officials to be honest. If in fact he's telling the truth and software is the problem, it seems to me that he's neglected his duty to keep the payroll system functioning.
Either way, he'll be hard-pressed to get my vote in the next election.
but I kinda like this guy.
This is exactly what republicans say they should do. Take a hard line against government waste. If the existing systems can't do the job, get new systems.
Also if the controller thinks that it will take as long to undo as it took to do (knowing when you are doing it that you will have to undo it), FIRE HIM AND EVERYONE WHO GAVE HIM AN ESTIMATE RIGHT NOW! This concept is so unforgivably wrong that for an engineer to not recognize that right off is virtually not possible (I expect this has been put forward a few times in this thread for just this reason).
If they actually wanted to update it using modern development methodologies, it probably wouldn't even be anywhere near as expensive as they have been quoting.
They need a COBOL programmer to assign everybody's wages to minimum.
But when he's done, whatever he sets his own wages to, he'll apparently be the only one who can change it.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Most likely this is a reaction from the system programmers. They've found a way to strike back at the state for years of mismanagement.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So get a working procurement system. Payroll software does not cost $177 million. Tell you what: I'll do it for $17.7 million. Of course, someone else will underbid me by yet another factor of ten...
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
$6.55 per hour? I'm sure a lot of companies would be interested in your services at that rate too...
As the financial problems of the state of California are quite obvious, any COBOL programmers who are capable and willing to do the job should make sure to get their money before they even look at the code or the documentation (if any).
And, by the way, can they contract programmers without having a budget?
I dont understand your job, so it must be really simple.
--PHB
In Soviet Russia, you controls computer!
I have a 15 year old sign program. It's sole purpose is to manipulate those fancy signs you see on the freeway. "slow down.. amber alert etc" This program was created by a student who left a few years later. Of course said student took the source with him and we've been stuck for 13 years making this dos program work on the varying versions of windows.
You should be able to get the source back. Ask the San Francisco IT department for some tips.
How on earth does anyone survive on that!
Australia has a similar cost of living, and our minimum wage is around US$15/hour.
Is the USA that broke, or do you have a much cheaper cost of living.
According to the BigMac index, fast food cost is similar.
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11793125
What gives?
46137
Remove data from Cobol and input data in java software
It's true that the information in the market, in most cases, provides enough benefit in naturally competitive environments to make state run enterprises a bad idea.
However, when you look at some things, they simply can't be privatized. US health care is more expensive than any other in the world, and is not the best. People break out anecdotes of "Oh, this one guy had to wait six months to get his knee replaced." Guess what... they still got it replaced for free. You can still whip out a credit card and go to private health care, but the rest of the population gets the medical care they need for far less money, instead of waiting until it's a life or death emergency that taxes the system much more than cheaper preventative care given away for free.
Just because our politicians are inept doesn't mean all politicians are. Perhaps we need a change in who we vote for rather than hoping privatization will help somehow.
Pure bull! Because:
1 - Any programmer using any language could in less than 4 hours could write a program to first save then alter the files containing the employee's payrate. And then later restore the rate to its previous value.
2 - This does not require a COBOL program change, which by the way given the file layout I could write the program in 30 minutes or less and do it in COBOL, FORTRAN, PASCAL, ORACLE procedure or BASIC (maybe).
3 - the state has employed programmers in the last 2 years, none of which were for their COBOL skills.
Slashdot readers deserve that you check out the facts before publishing such crap.
Whooo haaaah!!!!
All Indian outsourcing companies have lots of COBOL programmers.
Really makes you wonder what the tax money is being spent on. It's not like citizens are being stingy paying taxes. We pay a LOT of taxes. Yet the state still can't manage the money nor can it make logical business decisions any better than companies that only look far enough into the future to address their next quarterly earnings.
And people wonder why conservatives like me don't want the government "fixing" our problems for us and why we'd rather just pay lower taxes for fewer "services." The only service the government really offers is the national defense and money mismanagement. Granted, they're very good at both.
I see what the problem is, you can't read worth a fuck.
"This Mr. Coward accepts your apology"
Look again dumbass, there isn't an "apology", there's a statement made to look like an apology so your stupid ass will shut up and stop bothering him because you objected to something you weren't smart enough to read correctly. Like the "apology" that isn't there, moron.
"If only more /. threads ended so harmoniously. :)"
You mean with me calling you a fucking idiot? Yes, I wish that happened more often too, you fucking idiot.
California Minimum Wages[dir.ca.gov] :
January 1, 2007 $7.50
January 1, 2002* $6.75*
January 1, 2001* $6.25*
March 1, 1998 $5.75
September 1, 1997* $5.15*
March 1, 1997* $5.00*
October 1, 1996 $4.75
July 1, 1988 $4.25
So send Arnold to go back in time and figure out how they initially coded an increase from 6.25 to 6.75 in 12 months (2001-2002). or 5.00 to 5.15 in 7 (1997).
And to terminate the comptrollers parents--I mean john conner--I mean the parents of everyone involved in the next movie.
Whoever said it was political was right. Something tells me the comptroller is out of a job... BUT running for political office next year for sure!
Fast forward 25 years:
There are plenty of Java Programmers out there, the problem is nobody in IT wants to hire old people.
Bahzing!
IF GOVHOLDER = GOP AND PAY = CUT
( PAY = PAY; RESPONSE = NOWAY;
GOVPAY = GOVPAY * 0.90;
REBATE = REBATE + GOVSLUSHFUND;
GOVSLUSHFUND = 0.00;
IRSFLAG = EXEC;
);
Hmmm. Bet he wasn't expecting that ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=payroll
Yeah, sure why not. Doesn't cost me nothing. I love how everyone here is superimposing estimated hours to completion on this project, and none of you has even seen the source code, or even the most minimal level of documentation regarding this payroll system.
California is very lucky it's payroll system is written in COBOL. COBOL stands the test of time - and - if it was written in something else, nobody would get paid. There are plenty of COBOL programmers out there. The problem is the new programmers that work for the State government can't think in COBOL anymore. Read a file - write a record. How hard is it?
All of the "expert suggestions" in this thread and in TFA's comments section are ridiculous. Sounds just like "Dr." Bill Frist disgracing the medical profession by "diagnosing" Terry Schiavo from a videotape. None of the posters have seen the code and its gotchas, so no one is qualified to declare how dirt simple it must be to solve this problem.
From TFA:
That's a bit like something is on par with spears and IMCBs. Can't be on par with both of them.
Shall we talk about "bullshit"? Let's start with your comment, a charming blend of distortion and fabrication.
Issuing IOUs to state employees during budget crises is not standard procedure in California nor, to my knowledge, any other state. The last time IOUs were issued to state workers in California was when Pete Wilson (another Republican governor) attempted it in 1992, when the state ran out of cash during protracted budget negotiations — something controller Chiang assures us will not happen until at least the end of September.
Banks refused to accept the IOUs, and public employees were finally driven to take legal action. The state was ultimately forced to come to a settlement with workers in 1996, after a 1995 ruling by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. found that the state's IOUs were not "cash or its equivalent" and violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. California has never since issued IOUs as pay.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
You may not be correct. It may be VSAM files. Try changing those is batch.
I'm currently working as a J2EE Architect/Developer for the state of California on a different project. After reading this story I approached our main COBOL guy on the team (also happens to be good at J2EE systems, he actually manages the dev team) and asked him about this. He seemed to think that the values for employee salaries may not be in a database. My response was, "Wow".
We are currently replacing a system that is COBOL build on top of ADABAS. This system is under ten years old. Why was it built with those technologies? That's what people around here know and the budget was pretty small. Again, "Wow".
The California DMV is currently redoing their antiquated system. It is written is assembler. They are updating it to COBOL. So I know that DMV has snatched up many of the COBOL developers in Sacramento.
Although the project I'm working on is written as Java batch jobs and a webapp deployed on WebSphere, it has a requirement that everything must run on the mainframe. The mainframe is way overused and cannot handle the load but for some reason (and the managers on the project won't tell us who controls this) we cannot deploy onto any system other than the mainframe. We estimate that with about $20K - $40K in UNIX boxes we could easily have enough performance for the production system. If that number seems high to your then please note that the project is burning through around $422K/month in development costs. But no, we'll finish performance testing and realize that we need more processing power and end up spending $124K minimum to get the second ZAP processor enabled (the hardware is installed, IBM just left it disabled until we come up with the $$$) or we'll end up purchasing another general purpose processor for about half a million.
Why all the rambling? To give others an idea of what the development world is like in the state of California. It's been an interesting lesson is scope, scale, and the cost of legacy systems.
--
EBCDIC sig: $%##@%^$%@
Here we are with The State unable to pay it's bills, but also unable to stop writing checks.
If only it was a crime for the state to write bad checks.
It could get really funny really quickly.
If only banks were so inept at money management that their software would force them to honor all checks presented. Hah! Banks are going out of business these days because of poor management.
If only The State could have the same thing happen to it.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Oh yes, woe is the overworked, underappreciated, and underpaid government employee...
Ok, I really don't know a whole lot about prices in America, I haven't lived there for 24 years, and I know Ireland is one of the most expensive countries in the world to live in, given that a substantial percentage of the actual profit made in our over-inflated economy goes abroad to American and other investors (who provide us with jobs, I'm not complainging too much about that), but... is it possible to live on $6.55 an hour in California? Here, the minimum wage is â8.65 (thats euros, /. doesnt seem to want to display the euro symbol), or $13.36, and I know for a fact that that will not provide a terribly comfortable standard of living here. But that is the wage given to the Indian student behind the till in the local offlicence, the Chinese girl that makes your sandwich at lunchtime, the Polish builder whose lack of english allows him to be exploited by employers until his friends introduce him to the unions.
Government workers over here, apart from the always overworked and underpaid nurses and schoolteachers, on the otherhand are lazy, incompetent, jobs for life with inflationary-indexed pensions, and highly overpaid bastards. And civil servants usually are like that everywhere. For them to be getting paid that wage..... are things really that bad over there?
Instead of worrying about antiquated systems and trying to find COBOL programmers, why don't they just finish the budget? This happens every year in California, and it's beyond me why they can't ever manage to get it done on time.
Couldn't they just hold on to the pay checks generated by the system and issue new checks for minimum in the mean time. Then when the budget is passed, they could just ask people to pay them back in return for the checks the system generated. This isn't hard, seriously.
So what's so hard about writing a program to read in COBOL and output something that looks like javascript?
I don't see what Kobol has to do with minimum wage, I mean, the planet is a waste and doesn't even have any life on it except for maybe a few cyclons.
Ave Molech Setting
Really, not the meme, just look at former soviet states. As soon as all government employees (or better: everyone) got laid off after the communist system collapsed, a lot of military equipment ended up just going to the highest bidder, energy plants and other vital parts went to the now-billionaires who were smart enough to reserve their own spot in the new system. Most former sovjet states are still having a hard time because of this.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I'm only 34 and I know COBOL
Hey, wasn't Jesus crucified when he was 34? Not that I'm suggesting COBOL knowledge is akin to crucifixion or anything...
Screw the payroll systems, California should just start issuing their own money. Then they can pay the state workers in useless "California Bux".
That's why you're free to get another job, or go to college.
Reagen started with a 2.5% deficit. He doubled it to 5%.
The President sets the framework for the budget.
The President is required to submit to Congress a proposed budget by the first Monday in February. Although this budget does not have the force of law, it is a comprehensive examination of federal revenues and spending, including any initiatives recommended by the President, and is the start of extensive interaction with Congress.
The Congressional Budget Process
The Federal Budget affects everyone. If Federal funding drops, the States may have to pick up the slack. It was balanced because Clinton simply cut military spending, an act he's constantly derided for now despite it's solid fiscal foundation. Both parties are far to the right, but the Republicans have simply become an absurdity in comparison with the standard for politics in the 21st century. The fact that a lie about a sex act got more attention than administration-wide corruption and lies about the pretext for the invasion of Iraq is a sad testament to how far we haven't come from our Puritan roots.
I'm not blaming W. I'm blaming all the people he brought back from the cabinets of his father and Reagan. That's the only reason I'm voting Obama - just to get the non-elected old white men who have a knack for spending money we don't have on wars we don't need to wage, and the chance to see some leadership change in the Pentagon. Hopefully men who favor diplomacy over illegal wars of aggression.
As far as I can tell, our deficit goes down we're not invading other countries, which is pretty easy to understand. We're fueling a worldwide arms race, mostly because the government contracts which are given out to local economies are turning us into a nation obsessed with military spending. Politicians can't afford to let the jobs go away, and at the same time we can't afford to spend over half of our discretionary budget on war toys.
The COBOL is just fine. The CICS data base contains the salaries.
The State of California actually has competent CICS data base programmers. (the famous Data Base Administrators: DBAs)
Should take about two days to back up the data base, (Which on a mainframe is done constantly) and load the new salary tables. About 2 hours if you are an expert.
To recapture the salaries lost would take a more determined effort, but so what if the state employees had to wait ten years. I bet the state employee programmers would be motivated to recoup their lost salaries.
usb floppy drive
Doesn't alter the system so won't void maintenance.
The mistakes of the 1700s British labour relations are getting replayed by one of the richest governments on earth in 2008. There are very few entire countries that have a budget exceeding that of the State of California.
Tell 'em to go SAP. It'll be easy to implement, not require any help, no additional servers than what they have, and it'll happen overnight! The government has to believe the same thing that companies seem to! :)
I'm sure Feudalism was not considered when the software was designed so you can't blame the software either :)
I used to be able to program in COBOL (along with Fortran, APL, PL1, RPG and a number of other now obscure languages) and COBOL's claim to fame was "self-documentation". Only problem is of course is that it is as wordy as hell and a pain to program. Fixing, especially something as commonplace as a payroll program wouldn't be that difficult (if you can program you should be able to generally figure it out), but there are issues that perhaps Slashdotters aren't aware of like:
- you may have to make major modifications in order to deal with deductions for unemployment or social security taxes as the calculation may have been based on them earning a like amount (or higher) throughout the year
- pay scales may by job classification (ie. programmer level 1) so could be hard coded, but I have my doubts
- most important of all, making the changes to all wages for all employees could be a massive input project requiring programming, which might take longer than the pay period (ie. you have 2 weeks till the next pay and can't complete it
I'm not saying the state controller is right, but there are reasons why this response may not be complete BS (just partial BS eg. shouldn't take 6 months)
Why bother to travel to the third world when your elected officials are trying to create it at home?
Obviously this story is complete bullshit. No matter how antiquated, there is no way the payroll system is incapable of changing the pay of salaried employees to any arbitrary value. Handling pay raises and demotions are a normal routine task for payroll operations. Arnie should march down to the IT department and demand to see them change the records for his own pay. They can't dodge and play political games when you have the man in their prescence. Once he forces them to show the proof of concept, they can be ordered to do the same for all other employees.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I know COBOL. But I can see they're not going to pay much to modify the code. That's too bad because now they're stuck.
Got to love the unintended consequences of this one.
dd if=/dev/floppy of=/media/floppy.img && mount -t auto /media/floppy.img /mnt/floppy
Why not?
If you use the word floppy all the way through, you could make it a two letter variable and same a handful of bytes, too =)
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
[...] two letter variable and save a handful [...]
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I took COBOL in the Late 90s as a 'filler course'. Would love to help except for 2 things:
1. I kissed the computer industry good-bye when I realized a lot of people were being promoted because they went to church with the boss (or hung out with him) rather than actually having any talent (or competence)
2. I live in Van-sterdam and probably wouldn't be allowed into the US.
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
Number of payroll warrants issued monthly 168,802
Number of direct deposit payments issued monthly 277,298
Percentage of employees on direct deposit 68%
Amount of gross wages paid monthly $1,625,842,348
Amount of net wages paid monthly $1,087,354,433
Amount of Federal taxes withheld monthly $179,489,126
Amount of State taxes withheld monthly $48,059,733
Amount of payroll deductions withheld monthly $161,969,765
Source: http://www.sco.ca.gov/ppsd/empinfo/demo/index.shtml
For all those people saying to fix this in Perl or c-shell: hah!
HAH!
how do they give their employees an immediate change in pay rate at all other times?
if what the controller says is true then that is not possible.
i doubt that pay rates and salaries are hard coded.
me. --a by-product of public education
That was my first job, a summer job in high school. In COBOL.
Maybe the Governator will use the LHC Collider to send back a Code-Terminator to fix the code. What year should he send the Code-terminator?
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...
I can do CICS as well. Also ADS/O and Tp for GCOs. Hell, I am currently in a CICS/DB2 shop.
It is a load of crock that it is that hard to modify a COBOL system. The reason it stuck around so long was because it was so easy. I modified a COBOL system when I was a teenager back in the 70's without even knowing I was programming in COBOL. It was monkey-see-monkey-do easy. It wasn't until my wife took a COBOL course 20 years later that I realized that I had been tainted. The states and feds used to send people who scored high on the civil service exam through a quick training course and make them COBOL programmers. In my highschool in the 70s it was a Vo-Tech course that was mostly taken by smart FFA girls. These guys are making it sound hard so that they can justify paying some friend of theirs to come in as a gazillion dollar consultant to change a couple of parameters in the code in one day, cool their heels for 6 months and then laugh all the way to the bank when they declare the project done. I have seen this exact situation several times from government bureaucrat types.
I AM READY, ARNOLD! ...umm HATE COBOL, but somebody has to do the dirty job. - Sorry, Admiral Grace - (may she RIP)
I learned this pissant language 40+ years ago, before there were even hard disks.
I
I am willing to rescue California from this conundrum.
Just send me a return ticket.
But alas I demand more than $5.50/hr. How about $9.95?
Per.. MINUTE? Mmwahhhaaa haa haa..
Seriously guys- I am thinking of coming out of retirement!
uggg...
.
.
- aqk
F U
I respectfully disagree. Of anyone, the Controller should be be on Arnold's side, saying that it's illegal to print checks when the bank account is empty. Do you think it's appropriate write bad checks? How about writing checks against an account that you haven't moved money into yet? Yes you have the money in your savings account, but you don't have permission to move the money from savings to checking - and it could be months before you get permission. Is it still appropriate to write checks against an empty checking account?
The guy is the Accountant for the state. You'd think maintaining the integrity of the books would matter to him.
Obviously, the state has the money - the problem is that the legislature is withholding the budget. You can blame Arnold; but that's ignoring the fact that it take two to tango.
It's not like June 30 was some mystical event that changes with the clouds and the wind. In fact, the legislature had 365 days to prepare the FY 08-09 budget.
That it's not done by now is design - not chance.
Every state worker knows this. If one is a state worker, and got caught by surprise with the budget delay, they are either a complete state employee newbie, or willfully ignorant. This happens every year. To not be prepared for it is foolish.
If anything, writing minimum wage checks is a softer blow than issuing temporary pink slips....
I don't see it as Arnold vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. I see it as a politician applying pressure to elected officials guilty of fiduciary negligence. And because the state employees know the game, it's not as bad as it sounds.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
Generalizations? Hahahaha, think outside the box dude, the legacy system this runs on is not the be all end all, data can be exported and imported.
Between choosing a temporary pay cut and having no pay whatsoever, I'm sure I'd want to have some money in my pocket. How on earth could you see this as a political stunt? I would have thought this was actually your Governator, concerned about your welfare, trying to relieve your pay woes as they sort out the budget.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
I wish I would have listened to my parents when they told me to learn COBOL. Yes, they were both COBOL programmers.
Here's a free replacement, only about 60 lines of ColdFusion plus a few formula tables to fill in:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/payroll2.htm
Take advantage of web paradigm fights to get free payroll systems.
I guess while the COBOL programmer was being fired last week, he turned around, looked at the Governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and said:
"I'LL BE BACK"
In this field no matter how much you know, You still don't know anything.
Hey, I did COBOL from 1987 to 2003, on PCs and UNIX boxes and even on the big boxes of IBM. I'm stuck here in the Philippines and with the way we're going, I'm willing to relocate to California and take that job!
Honestly! Call me! Now! Please!
no sig = no personality(?)
As a colleague of mine has said, if you cannot teach your Java programmers COBOL, then you don't want them writing Java in the first place. Programming has zero to do with a language. Give them a book; tell them to think sentences (periods instead of semicolons) and let them be on their way. As others have said, it is really the design of the system. There is nothing new about databases. Mainframes have had databases for 40 years. And yes,clearly the controller is a liar. I suspect if someone offered her a big raise, the check would get updated pretty quick.
The problem is that if they're paying minimum wage they're competing against a job where the biggest stressor is remembering to say "Welcome to WalMart" when people walk in the door. That, and WalMart has to actually pay the state minimum wage, and the job is to ensure that state employees (including the programmer) get paid the lower federal minimum wage.
The bigger problem is that if Arnie-baby actually achieves this goal a lot of state employees are going to discover they are due their 20 year retirement and/or realize that real-estate prices in the rest of the country are so low they can trade their 1200 sq ft California "Ranch home" - even at fire sale prices - for a riverfront 2500 sq ft house on a 40 acre spread in Ephrata, WA and have enough money left over to fund their job search in a growth market for 20 years.
850 Sq ft on 1/20th acre. 1bd, 1bath built in 1928. Near transit. $800,000.
What, are you nucking futz? The problem with doing this to school teachers is that you also require they be good at math.
I imagine if Arnie achieves his goal the California mortgage industry could see a spike in defaults. Just guessing here.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Lords of COBOL heard their prayers? (end oblig. BSG ref.)
Unions gave you most of what has not taken away in 1981 and onwards. Trying to destroy them only hurts yourself - as these benefits came to places outside unions. It's only gotten worse as unionbusters switched to H1-B/L-1 to finish off the white collar workers.
I'm not sure why unions act like every person should be guaranteed a job.
Business would run over union and non-union workers. They have done so, espcially after the 1981 "open season on workers" call made by Reagan wrt PATCO.
What universe you have to live in for things to be so certain?
Their job is to ensure that business cannot lord over the worker with impunity. If one ensures they do not fear about their job, they can concentrate more on their work. That's something that's happened with union and non-union workplaces.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Those companies or organizations that are in such position that cannot support and/or modify a legacy system, it is because of their moronic attitude to IT budget and strategic planning. It is a strategic plan that you ought to update hardware AND software. If you nowdays run your IT on a PDP/11 would be considered just insane, because of lack of components for maintenance and technical expertise, the same holds also for software. You just keep the same software as it is, because it just runs, but issues of maintanability in the long run should apply also, like we do in hardware.
So, if you are in some bad situation, of problematic software support, it is just because the CIO/CTO wouldn't budget software update, either in newer frameworks, languages etc.
All these from of former COBOL programmer.
god is real unless declared integer, that is.
I worked on a bonus system in 1982 that required a rerun of the whole payroll suite to calculate the bonuses for SIX local government employees it only took six weeks to code and implement. The system was twenty years old at the time and even then used a simple parameter file for pay rates rather than hard coding them. You don't need a database for things like that but it is sheer ignorance to say that 1970s databases were non relational - read up on IDMS and IDMSX. Final and obvious comment from an old COBOL programmer I'LL BE BACK.
Back in the late 80's I worked on System 38 and OS/400 based systems and the hottest topic of the time was graphical user interface design software for mainframe applications. It worked great too. See, mainframe applications don't generally have veyr advanced user interfaces, so to aquire and alter data through the on screen fields through a remote terminal emulation is simplistic in every way.
:)
I believe IBM even sells some software like what I desribed, but that's not the point.
Give me a day or two in front of a Linux box with tn3270 and I'll make a system which will read all the relevant data from the mainframe ISAM to the local system so the values prior to the change can be stored for recovery later on.
Then I'll take another two days to make a program which will open up each record in the database which met the criteria concerning the minimum wage shift based on either name or social security number. Then I'll change the data to minimum wage or to the previous salary level depending on the task.
I would then make multiple test runs to ensure that it works before screwing the entire work force of public California.
Altogether, it would require about a week to do the task and maybe on that many records a few hours to a day to run.
If you want me to do it, I'll do it for $10,000 plus flight, rental car, and 4(+) star accomodations for me and my family.
Or you can probably find some college kid with no experience and no accountability and pay him/her $6.55 an hour for a month or three to do it
Enjoy
P.S. As to the guys all talking about how jobs are hard to get. I've worked at 3 major retail software/hardware vendors as a senior level developer. One thing I can safely say is.. apply for the job even if the skills required are something that interest you. Fact is, 90% of the time, the unrealistic requirements can be overcome if you sell yourself as someone capable of learning the technology. Most companies actually respect initiative over proficiency.
Back when that system was written, it was generally worth keeping knowledge about subprograms to yourself, unless you wanted to be thought of as a weirdo. COBOL's FUNCTION keyword is pretty tangential to the normal meaning, and the last time I checked, a "function" had to be invoked in a separate statement. Actually, PERFORM was about the only thing most programmers knew about back then.
Learning COBOL is pretty simple. There is a great tutorial at http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/default.htm. COBOL is meant to be an easy language to learn. It's not object-oriented, it doesn't have a scope, so it is obsolete by today's programming standards. The one problem I've found with most COBOL programs is that they were written by very old school programmers that would code values directly into the program (rather than in a configuration file or table). There is usually a veil of secrecy too, mostly for the purpose of job security, but sometimes just because the programmer has forgotten whatever they programmed, and didn't bother commenting.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
"Can't find COBOL programmers?"
It's just a procedural language. Any decent programmer should be able to start working in it with 3 or 4 days sitting down with a book on the language.
One of the classes we were required to take for graduation was basically "10 languages in 10 weeks" - You got an hour intro to a language on Monday and an assignment. Wednesday was more coverage and questions on the assignment. Friday was wrapup and discussion of what advantages this particular language had for certain things. The assignment was due on Monday when they started on the next assignment.
What they told us on day one was "Any graduate of this college should be able to pick up a language they've never seen before and start doing productive work on it in less than a week."
I also wonder about the statement that they haven't been able to "modernize" it. It's possible that it doesn't NEED modernization. COBOL is a pretty good language for what it does.
If you cut the Employees to Federal Minimum Wage, they are now legally qualified to collect Unemployment.
(Because a reduction of more than X hours/week or $X/hour from your normal qualifies you for limited Unemployment benefits.)
Which means the money he "saved" from reducing their pay to FMW suddenly gets eaten by all the workers who start collecting Unemployment, Food Stamps, etc.
Then, when the "emergency" is over, he has to pay them back the wages they are due.
He will have, effectively, paid them *twice*.
Good job, Arnie.
*Dumb Ass*
As you said, I envision a LOT of people considering this their "walking papers" (which, as far as the Law & the Unemployment Office is concerned, they have been fired), selling short, & getting the hell out of California.
Washington, Oregon, or Nevada can expect to see an influx of previous CA residents who are sick & f'ing tired of being raped by the very people they used to work for.
The fact that they can take what in CA is poverty-level retirement savings, move across the State line, & suddenly live closer to Royalty than Peasantry?
Yeah, now THAT'S a great way to keep the government running, Arnie.
=(
The point is : State workers and Cobol programmers at China rates...
I shouldn't admit to this, but I also know 1401 Autocoder...
Dog is my co-pilot.
Thank you, symbolset. And I respect your opinion but I disagree. There's actually a parallel world thing going on here. You live in one, I live in another.
I started programming just as the minicomputer revolution was breaking out in the early 1960s. I spent some time around the PDP-1, which was used by a major international communication carrier for doing message switching. I worked for a time on the Burroughs B300, a business computer that worked directly with data in the BCD char set, the forerunner of ASCII, and did decimal arithmetic directly on fields of digits. Tools were primitive and I was attracted to building tools.
In the 1970s I personally developed the core communications operating system for a financial information service company, in assembly language, on a proprietary 16-bit minicomputer. I helped them recover from 2% market share in the industry they had invented to over 60% market share. While there I designed and built what may have been the first caching disk controller, wrote numerous neat utilities, and specified what may have been one of the early proto-LANs to interconnect up to 16 of our machines at DMA speed. I also learned the power of small team development where everyone knows their stuff cold and can complete each other's sentences in an environment free of politics.
It wasn't until the mid 1980s that I came to know a certain type of mainframe. I did about 50/50 systems and utility development and business applications, first in compiled BASIC, later in COBOL and a proprietary 4GL/database. That segment of the mainframe world peaked in the mid to late 1980s and began a decline brought on by a combination of overzealous PC weenies and slow movement by all mainframe and mini manufacturers to integrate PC technology.
The user community in which I worked shrank seriously through the 1990s but it wasn't until after Y2K that consulting business began to drop off for me. I switched my attention to a package that allowed moving COBOL apps essentially unchanged to Unix on RS/6000 or HP. The speed was great but there were too many wrinkles, and much of the beloved mainframe environment was missing.
In 2003 I took steps that resulted in the virtualization of my favorite line of mainframes, and in 2004 co-founded two companies to promote the technology. In early 2005 we signed a multi-year contract with the mainframe manufacturer to bring a new, virtualized generation of their systems to market. By that time all their legacy stuff was showing its age and they had nothing to offer their customers as a way forward.
In late 2005 the first of our systems was sold. By then we had settled on the Dell PowerEdge 28x0 machines running Linux and spec'ed out with the fastest Intel CPUs and other parameters. We were able to offer performance 50% greater than the fastest of the legacy mainframe models. In 2006 we adopted the PowerEdge 29x0 machines and faster, better Intel CPU chips and were able to offer twice the performance of the legacy top end. This year we're moving up again and can offer 220% of the legacy top end performance.
Things progressed, and we now have over 60 sites in ten countries, all happy customers, most of the systems being the enterprise processor, a few being subordinate in large conglomerations of multiple platforms, and a few used only for archival storage of and access to data.
It is typical of our customers that they built their own applications over the course of 10, 15, 20, even 25 or more years. The applications do precisely what they want, they are stable and nearly bug free, and they have competent staffs of programmers. Most use COBOL, a few use RPG, and one notable case that has not moved to our technology has apps written entirely in assembly language and 1/10th the processing cost that is standard in their industry.
Our virtualized mainframe is the perfect solution for these folks. It is 100% seamlessly compatible with all their software. No data or programs have to be converted, just moved into the
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
Nevada is lovely. Oregon less so. They should not come to Washington though. We get one sunny day a year - usually a Wednesday. Moss grows on the sidewalks. Mold grows in the walls. The eternal gloom drives people insane. We get 100' of rain a year here. And then there are the roving packs of rabid pitbulls and their meth addicted owners. Save yourself - stay away! Nevada is lovely.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Now wait a minute...
I thought the reason public employees weren't paid during the "budget crisis" was that the state had no money to pay them with.
If instead the state can spend tens or hundreds of millions a week paying all its employees minimum, why not just pay them their normal salaries and be done with it?
Can't be changed because of COBOL?
Piffle. The code would probably be a mess if it was written in C, Fortran or Lisp.
COBOL is not any different than any other procedural language an any programmer worth the title could probably learn to read and patch it in a week.
This is just another instance of ass covering management that now has a change request it can't fill becase it's been sitting on hands building a little dynasty for the last umpteen years.
Just wait until the Java Generation retires and they don't teach OO in universites anymore because X is the new silver bullet! A laugh then when they try to modify some of those systems.
Just further proof that the Lords of Cobol are upset with our lack of faith.
Life needs more saving throws.
Wasn't written very well at all sounds like.
Should simply have a DB2 table w/ job categories and pay rates in it that the programs look up.
You would then just edit the pay tables and be done, no coding changes.
We run our entire business on COBOL, DB2 and OS2.
There's much more to this story than that, from Crooks and Liars
"Controller John Chiang is standing up to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- refusing to comply with the devastating Executive Order the Governor signed last Thursday -- despite 28,016 petitions Courage Campaign, CREDO Mobile and True Majority members sent to his office."
The solution is obvious and easy: no budget in place, no payments at all.
Problem solved.
Let's see... If one team of Cobol programmers can update the system in 180 days, 180 teams of Cobol programmers ought to be able to update the system in one day, right? I'm surprised that no senior administration official has made that suggestion....yet.
I used to live in Spokane.
'Nuff said.
=}
Surely they are tackling this from the wrong perspective. The simple solution (though I will admit this is a little over simplified), would be for the current payroll system should carry on as normal - except not actually pay anyone, rather pay a virtual account. Meanwhile they should set up a quick and dirty parallel system for minimum wage - then when the time comes to pay the back pay, pay them everything they would have received less the amount they have been paid already.
In reality - they should just continue paying their regular wages. Money doesn't just disappear because you don't have a budget - should everyone stop paying their local government tax* just because the State doesn't have a budget to pay it into?
Heck, how the feck can any organisation, much less the state government, get into this sort of situation? I suppose that's what you get when you elect (third rate) actors. In the UK, if there were this sort of a funding crisis in local government they would just double the Council Tax.
* BTW I am from the UK so don't know how Council Tax is worked out in the other 50 states.
> Good luck CA. You'll need it
Part of me wants to see CA crash big time, as a test to see if burning down the house and rebuilding it is a viable strategy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I had a brief encounter (thanks god) with NY State department of finance IT. 40 State employees and 60 hired guns (h1) trying to re-engineer state tax system. After four years and who knows how many millions wasted (100+) the effort was abandoned by a new governor. The system still relies on UNIVAX (that's 50s technology), but the fun part is - it was re-engineered as Cobol, mostly batch. They used all the right oo lingo, but applied it to Cobol. Just broke all Cobol programs to small pieces and named them components. No kidding. I was fired when started making nasty remarks of their architects. B.T.W. those were making $150+ per hr. I guess, how much of it was for kick-backs? B29EG.
> And why on earth would it take 50% longer to raise them back up again? That makes absolutely no sense.
It's easier to change EVERYONE'S salary to ONE number than it is to go over ALL instances of that one number and change it in EACH case to a different number, for every person.
> probably at least once a year people get reviewed and get raises
Yes, but that's spread out over the course of the year. The don't do a review for EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE STATE at the same time. It probably takes most of the year to do it, like the controller is saying.
They taught it to people (business majors) that could not handle Fortran (engineering, hard science). Now, last week when Zimbabwe had to lop off 9 zeros so that currencey would fit into excel, well, that was something!
Why don't they just go and hire some programmers and TRAIN them in Cobol? Then they won't have to buy a new system...
(Yes, I have colleagues who work in OPM COBOL, those exist)
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
Ha ha ha,,
We lost our previous Governer because he was trying to keep a tax to balance the budgets.
A Tax which eventually was put back in place by the dear terminator.
This is more of a We the People get what we deserve situation.
People think if they educate themselves that will solve the problem, no, we have to educate the people.
Im a COBOL programmer,
Give me a green card and I will
fix all the payrolls in California.
COBOL RUleS... :-)
nakar1@yahoo.com
First, a minor informative point: The requirements are not just that you cut pay to minimum wage, it's that you be able to give people their full salary later as a retroactive check.
My main reaction though, is that the people giving this estimate are paid by their own system. I think most of us, when asked how long it takes to cut our own pay to minimum wage, would give pretty long estimates too.
All this mysterious money for everyone, so they don't have to work hard or go to school. Man I hope THAT money never runs out.
Since you have faith in fictional narratives instead of reality, I think American politicians suit you just fine as they are.
Very well then. I am impressed. I had made light of the situation. Your detailed and well thought comment reminds me that one measure of the quality of a tool is its durability. COBOL certainly has that.
Another measure of a programming language is the breadth and depth of tools, the utility of the applications developed in it. COBOL has this too as you note.
The times have for the most part left mainframes behind. Perhaps these virtualized mainframes you speak of will help bring a wider audience to their appeal.
You remind me also that a great well integrated team can make great code and enjoy doing it. Both are important if you would do great things and I admire your achievements.
OK then, COBOL is not dead yet.
But I understand that COBOL is habit forming and youths are not eagerly taking it up for fear of getting hooked. In the end even your great team will tire of the endless grind of recoding tax tables, amortization schedules and whatnot. In the end everybody retires. What then?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of COBOL the language, but there are features in and around the culture and environment of COBOL I'd like to see a lot more of.
Firstly, I'd like to see exactly the attitude towards projects you just expressed. Too many project proposals read like buzzword bingo and are packed full of inappropriate technology complete with flavor of the month fad language constructs (several of which are really very old ideas re-implemented poorly for people who think it's new). They also seem full of all sorts of irrelevant eye candy and featuritus that ultimately take longer than the core logic to implement without contributing anything of substance.
In some ways, the limited options in the old mainframe world forced a focus on appropriateness that's sorely missing these days.
A big one is I would love to see arbitrary precision BCD. IEEE floats and their sloppy handling of precision are a nightmare once you get beyond trivial uses.
Stability over change for the sake of change is another big win.
Ramen, the FSM created COBOL, that's why there is a GOTO statement; COBOL programs are full of spaghetti code!
The "American Century"? What does that mean?
How has the US been "dominating the world"? Culturally? Certainly not where I live (central Europe).
Economically? That one is probably true. And you know what? I don`t have any objection. All of my employers so far were American companies. And as long as they offer competitive salaries, and create a quantum of jobs, more power to them!
Is it world domination when we get to see some of your movies in the cinema? Is McDonalds and Burger King world domination?
I don`t know. But I`m pretty sure that this is at least a different kind of world domination than the one Hitler envisioned. I have to say I even like this kind of world domination - the effect it has on my country is definitely positive. Since America is not forcing us to accept its values, we can just cherry-pick what we like and ignore the rest, thank you very much.
Having worked with COBOL for 4 years (I stopped dealing with COBOL & CICS back in 2000), I can say that likely their is no 'database' or 'tables', instead you have a series of flat files the interconnected programs use. This was the way the big iron used at the banks & insurance companies I helped did things... Because they had always done things that way & it 'just worked'. Theyed keep one or two programmers on staff to update 'modules' (sub-programs) used for the often changing legal considerations of things like payroll. These guys usually had no idea what the main program itself looked like outside of sheets laying out the required input fields it would take from their sub-programs... It was usually quite a mess...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Please ... COPOL ...
And why would it take so long to modify and COBOL programmers are not hard to find ... it is only a belief spread by the new wave of programmers or perhaps a convenient excuse to do nothing.
This is obviously a conspiracy, Arnold was one of the original developers of the states COBOL payroll system, but he got fired. On his way out he told the receptionist, "You watch... I'll be back."
Personally, I'm not a big fan of COBOL the language, but there are features in and around the culture and environment of COBOL I'd like to see a lot more of.
Firstly, I'd like to see exactly the attitude towards projects you just expressed. Too many project proposals read like buzzword bingo and are packed full of inappropriate technology complete with flavor of the month fad language constructs (several of which are really very old ideas re-implemented poorly for people who think it's new). They also seem full of all sorts of irrelevant eye candy and featuritus that ultimately take longer than the core logic to implement without contributing anything of substance.
In some ways, the limited options in the old mainframe world forced a focus on appropriateness that's sorely missing these days.
A big one is I would love to see arbitrary precision BCD. IEEE floats and their sloppy handling of precision are a nightmare once you get beyond trivial uses.
Stability over change for the sake of change is another big win.
Indeed. And thank you.
One of the things against which we fight in my Wang mainframe subset of IT is what I might call the corrupting influence of IT fashion trends. Perhaps the greatest of these is the widespread belief that apps have to have GUI. A less focused one is that of being impressed with trendy, sometimes pretty tools and user interfaces. This is more like how people behave in the world of clothing fashion trends than how some of us think people should be behaving in Information Technology, formerly called Data Processing, where we are supposed to be providing our companies with applications that facilitate doing business. I prefer to deal with these IT fashion trend issues head on rather than skirting carefully around them.
The business of business is characters... letters, digits and some special characters. Mainframes and COBOL deal with char information and decimal values exceptionally well. Whether the chars are stored in mainframe indexed files or in a database is really not so important. Typically, businesses have to know who their customers are, what their own products are, have to be able to create and process orders, manage inventory, create invoices, process purchase orders, post various things to journals and general ledger, issue purchase orders, and in more advance EDI environments, process customer purchasing forecasts and deal with inbound and outbound electronic invoices, purchase orders, shipping notifications, etc.
All of that is characters organized into fields, the fields into records (or "rows"), and the records stored in files (or "tables"). GUI has nothing whatsoever to do with that, and all of that can be managed and dealt with without GUI. In the back office GUI doesn't contribute to the management of the company's data. If anything, it slows things down.
The big thing that some in my community have overlooked is that the application itself doesn't need GUI, it just needs to live on a GUI desktop. This is why the dedicated terminals or workstations have given way to emulators running in Windows. The app window may be char-based but more than one can be opened and it supports copy/paste. That's the key. Too many equate a char interface with a dedicated, single-purpose terminal and assume that if the terminal is replaced by a window on a GUI desktop, the app must then have all manner of GUI eye candy. Not so.
Starting in the early 1990s customers in the Wang VS community began to switch from dedicated Wang workstations to PCs with the ability to emulate Wang workstations. Very few surviving Wang VS systems still use dedicated workstations today. Their users work on PCs, usually running Windows, and they do the whole range of the usual PC things as well as having one or more mainframe app windows. They don't have any GUI issues even though the app windows are char-based.
Meanwhile, the preoccupation with trendy languages and tools encourages the creation of ti
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
Perhaps this is a trap for you. I'm sorry about that. I am gracious but pernicious. I asked you a question. You've avoided it so I'll ask it again:
So... What then? Have you got a plan for that? Your customers deserve a plan.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You aren't that much younger, pipsqueak. I'm 37.
www.wavefront-av.com