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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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 can code in COBOL. It seems unlikely, however, that Califorina can afford my fee.
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
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.
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
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
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.)
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.
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
Sorry, they already have a budget crisis.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
... 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
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
Yeah, poor Arnold. I'm sure he's clipping coupons.
Once again, pure political theatre.
Arnold already has more than enough cash to live in luxury for several lifetimes. His waiving of his governor's salary doesn't grant him any kind of moral high ground in my book.
How many of those state employees have families to feed and (sky-high California) mortgages to pay? How many are living paycheck to paycheck?
For Schwarzenegger to reduce 200,000 of his employees to poverty-level wages is a defining "Let Them Eat Cake" moment.
alias 'please'='sudo'
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
It's not a pay rate change. It's a minimum pay issuance. People will get the rest of the money they are due later (if they can figure out how to do it correctly). It's better than not being paid at all as other states do, or never being paid if temporarily laid off.
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).
Your program will need to calculate the pay due on the original pay rate, and calculate the pay to be issued on the minimum rate. It then needs to record the difference in the database for later issuance as pay. Then the tax programs need to do similar for the tax reports to the IRS. The tax is first calculated on the minimum pay issued. When the back pay is done, the tax calculations now have to be done on the combination of pay due for new earnings, as well as the back pay issued.
This all has to be integrated into the existing payroll system. Otherwise you're designing a new system. This is not anywhere near as trivial as you make it out to be.
3 - the state has employed programmers in the last 2 years, none of which were for their COBOL skills.
Either upgrade the existing COBOL system to handle split payments like this, or migrate the entire payroll system to modern methods and modern systems (something they are starting to work on, but will take at least a couple years to complete even if a maximum budget for the conversion is authorized).
Slashdot readers deserve that you check out the facts before publishing such crap.
Slashdot readers deserve analysis by someone experienced in these complex systems running on legacy computers, and/or someone experienced in conversion of large scale complex systems from one platform to another, and the testing procedures involved in both.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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: $%##@%^$%@
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
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.
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.
=(
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.
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."