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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.
The Governor refuses his salary, so that won't work.
I suspect the legislators are wealthy enough that their per diem cut wouldn't be too much hurt.
Now what *would* work...you know how they choose a pope?
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
As I understand it, Arnie wants to pay them minimum wage, and then grant them back pay once the budget is passed. That's a whole different calculation, and requires some kind of per-employee escrow account, etc...
If I was a Ca state employee, I'd be pissed. Thankfully, I'm not even a resident anymore.
As any fool knows, the T-800 software was written in 6502 assembler.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
My girlfriend works for the state. She handles part of the time/payroll process. Most of it is still manual and done in ledger books. For the facility she works at with about 500 employees there is a single person who handles all of the payroll data entry into the system. The entire system is so antiquated it would be a nightmare to sort out. It isn't as simple as updating a single value to $6.55 and being done with. Everything is tiered and based on seniority. Each position has a different pay rate and is influenced by how long the employee has been working for the state. There are so many layers of complexity in that system that it would boggle your mind. Hell... the state just LAID OFF 200,000 people. Those are only the part time folks. How many people are still employed? A million? Maybe more? Do you really want some amateur screwing with the production database that is responsible for paying a million people? And not just paying, but deducting social security, medicare, payroll taxes, pension payments, Cal-PERS and all of that?
Also what is funny here is that dropping the wages wont get very many state workers to quit, they are so entrenched with their vacation time and specialized skills that they WONT go anywhere, they just like to bitch about it. Your average gov't worker is just that, a person who couldn't move on, every once in a while you run a cross a bright star keeping the mess together but they never amount to much as they leave after a couple years anyway.
I have suggested many times that entire departments need to be fired, halved and hire new employees with 20% raises. There is so much bloat in personnel that it is insane, most of the shops have one guy doing the work for 10 people anyway.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
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.
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.
Actually he is 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.
Where did you get that idea? He's an elected official, not an appointee, and his job is to safeguard the state's finances, not be a flunky for Schwarzenegger.
It sounds like the Controller is letting his personal beliefs interfere with his professional responsibilities. That's a quick route to unemployment.
That's for the voters to decide.
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
Capping their per diem might hurt them more than removing their salaries. They get both. As of 2007, most legislators receive ~$113,000 per year, and then $162 per diem for each day they're in session (one or both may have gone up this year). Taking away their perks seems to get them moving faster than taking away their salary.
The major fault of the California system is that there is no real changeover. The system is so rigged that it's virtually impossible for any state legislative or House seat to change parties. The state Assembly and Senate are locked in to provide exactly (2/3 - 1) vote for the Democrats, leaving the rest to Republicans. This prevents the Democrats from having complete power (which would result in the populace demanding a new redistricting), but means they only need to get one or two Republicans to cave in to get what they want. This has allowed California to build up a 40% increase in revenues in five years, while at the same time the population increased by 4%, the Consumer Price Index increased by about 19%, and spending increased by 44%. Had the state been capped by the growth in population and CPI (or some other inflation rate), it would be spending only 24% more than it had when Schwarzeneggar was elected, and would have had plenty of money in a rainy-day fund to cover the more than 10% shortfall that it now has.
On top of this, the term limits that were voted into place (including by me) have turned out to be a colossal mistake. The legislature was once a fairly cordial place where most people settled into their seat, keeping constituents happy for a couple of decades, a few finding some ambition and targeting statewide or national office; It's now become a staring contest of ideologues, where no one budges on anything because it affects their chances to rotate into the other house or on to a more competitive office. It used to be that legislators had to learn to compromise because their opponent wouldn't just be there next year or next term -- they'd be there 10 or perhaps even 20 years later, and political memories can go back a very long time.
The current system has survived court challenges, but it's expected that without a new process brought in early, the 2011 redistricting is going to get contentious and end up in court for a drawn-out battle before the court imposes its own solution.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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: $%##@%^$%@
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
Parent should be "informative". The governor is actually getting a pay of $1 a year.
I'm surprised by the number of people posting who seem to have no experience working with legacy IT systems (COBOL or otherwise). Here's a quick primer:
First of all, there is generally no system architecture in legacy contexts. Rather, a set of interdependent applications will have grown into a system over time.
COBOL applications in particular are not built on RDBMS concepts and changes to back-end data must be made programatically or disaster is likely to ensue. In many cases, no living person will know all the tables that should be changed to update a particular value safely.
Here, the governor wished to cut the salaries of a broad category of employees which probably has no representation in the system. You can't just do a "update pay set rate='crap' where job_type not like '%critical%'" sort of approach. You would probably have to go through and re-classify many thousands of job types one-by-one to a new pay grade code, except that this would screw up benefits issues that weren't part of the pay cut.
To subsequently reimburse back pay, as the governor promised, you would have to keep track of the old pay grade in a system that almost certainly does not track history. Then you'd have to build in a method for accounting for back pay.
Bearing in mind there are no test suites for these changes, it's easy to believe it would take a while to implement them.