Y2K not employing retired programmers


By Erich Luening


Staff Writer, CNET News.com


August 13, 1999, 7:45 a.m. PT


URL: http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,40473,00.html


Experts who thought the Year 2000 technology problem would pull legions of
Cobol programmers out of retirement to fix the bug now say fewer retirees
than expected have been hired to handle the millennium glitch.


Since many companies are still finishing repairs, hard numbers on Y2K hiring
trends have yet to be assembled. But observers say businesses haven't dipped
into the deep pool of retired code-crunchers as often as expected. In fact,
both analysts and industry watchers report that overall, big businesses have
rarely strayed outside of their internal labor pools for Y2K help.


"We've seen many companies do much more work on this issue with internal
staff than [was] originally thought earlier on," said Bob Cohen, vice
president of communications at the Information Technology Association of
America, a trade association representing the technology industry.


Lou Marcoccio, an analyst at Gartner Group, said previous research that
Gartner had done showed demand for retired IT professionals across the board
for Y2K work. Program administrators and managers as well as programmers
were expected to be tapped for Y2K work.


Now, Marcoccio said organizations that "traditionally had trouble financing
and retaining IT professionals...in the government, education, and
healthcare industries" were recruiting retirees with experience in Cobol and
other technologies. The U.S. government, for instance, sent out a letter to
recent government retirees asking for voluntary help to work on Y2K issues.
However, Marcoccio said, most industries did not seek Y2K assistance from
retirees.


Just ask Larry Larsen, an older programmer who last year worked for a
consultant company that did Y2K work specifically for small businesses. The
company is now out of business and Larsen is building Web sites and working
as a consultant for senior citizens looking to get online. Y2K isn't in the
picture.


"We found that small businesses weren't interested," said Larsen. "They are
either ignoring the problem or not interested in doing the Y2K work until it
happens. A lot of companies decided to just upgrade."


Larsen is now doing consultant work for a company called SeniorSurfers which
goes to seniors' homes to help them set up home computers and get online.


On the whole, the majority of corporate brass decided against expanding
their IT budgets for Y2K, Marcoccio said. When IT managers realized this,
they handled their Year 2000 conversion work internally, he said.


Another reason for not hiring outside help "was most of the expertise on
business processes and applications existed inside of the company,"
Marcoccio said.


Marcoccio said the same trend toward using internal staff to fix Y2K
problems has also tempered the demand for technology consultants
specializing in Y2K. While in 1996 and 1997 many information technology
consultants and tool makers thought Y2K would bring a high demand for their
services "this never happened," said Marcoccio. "Many companies ended up
doing the work internally. In fact, we found that only 3 percent of Y2K work
was done by outside consultants."


As earlier reported, many observers, including senior citizen advocates,
thought the shortage of IT workers alone would cause many companies to seek
out the expertise and flexible schedules of retirees. Add on the deadlines
for Y2K conversion, and many thought it was a given.


But in fact, "there hasn't been a large number of retirees coming back into
the work force," Cohen said.


Representative of the lack of interest in senior programmers is Senior
Staff, a Campbell, California-based company that was created to fill this
need. The company estimates there are approximately 200,000 retired
"techies" available to work.


"Y2K has been a disappointment," said Senior Staff's CEO William Payson. "We
have about 16,000 vintage techies--that's what we call them now--in our
database."


Senior Staff is an information data bank, not an employment agency or
placement firm, providing contacts sorted by both specialty and skill level,
free of charge. For a modest fee, the company will provide employer
contacts.


Last year, Payson was counting on small businesses to be the source of work
for his "vintage techies," because he believed smaller enterprises with
tighter budgets would look to his cheaper workforce to do the Y2K work. That
never happened.


Payson has now converted and renamed his online database service from Senior
Staff 2000 to Senior Techs, to open up more possibilities for his vintage
workers and to handle work after the year 2000.


The Year 2000 problem, also known as the millennium bug, stems from an old
programming shortcut that used only the last two digits of the year. Many
computers now must be modified, or they may mistake the year 2000 for the
year 1900 and may not be able to function at all.
consider it? Only 81% of computer science graduates are NOT in
programming 20 years after they leave school; that's an awful lot of
people, and it doesn't even include other ex-programmers spit out of the
system.


It is also disappointing that he buys into the Lofgren bill. What is so
great about a $60,000 wage floor? Lofgren herself has said that the
average computer professional's salary in Silicon Valley is in the
mid-$80,000 range, and in an exquisite gaffe her own press secretary
said $60,000 is "peanuts" wages in the Valley. Gillmor may not realize
that Lofgren includes benefits in that $60K figure, including bonuses
and stock options, so the actually salary would be well below $60K. And
since those bonuses and stock options are unpredictable, the employers
would have to be allowed to estimate them, and one can be sure that
those "hypocritical" employers would not be shy about exaggerating
their value. And there is no index for inflation; since salaries
are going up at a rate approaching 10% per year in this field, that
$60K figure would be equivalent to $50K within 2 years, and continue
to erode after that. And did Gillmor notice that Lofgren's visa
would have no cap? Lofgren may have convinced Gillmor that all foreign
students in the U.S. are "geniuses"; a small percentage are, and we
should welcome them, but the vast majority are simply ordinary.


It is also disappointing to see Gillmor buy into the idea of
retraining. First, as I said, employers aren't willing to hire
programmers who retrain themselves, so why would they hire people
who go through retraining programs? Second, the best way to learn
a new software skill is ON THE JOB, not in a classroom.


Nevertheless, this is a truly excellent column.


Norm


San Jose Mercury News
August 20, 1999

BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News Technology Columnist

The technology industry leads the world in a variety of areas -- among
others, market value, velocity of change and willingness to take
risks. Here's another outstanding quality: hypocrisy.

The tech crowd, which rails against government -- except when it needs
a favor -- just can't stay away from the federal feedbag. Two recent
examples come to mind: visas for foreign workers and year 2000
legislation.

After fiercely and successfully lobbying only last year to double the
cap on temporary H-1B visas for foreign workers, and then all but
swearing off further such requests, the industry wants to lift the cap
much, much higher.

Yes, there is a shortage of workers in the technology field. But it's
at least partly a shortage of workers who are young or cheap enough
and willing to work 18 hours a day for months on end, not just ones
who are smart or sufficiently qualified for the jobs. I've heard from
too many over-40 types with excellent résumés to trust the industry's
denials of age discrimination.

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, has weighed in with an interesting
proposal: to award an unlimited number of five-year visas to foreign
nationals who get engineering or science degrees from U.S.
institutions of higher learning and who land jobs paying $60,000 a
year or more. It's an interesting idea, but doesn't go far enough.

The H-1B program's biggest flaw is its very structure. It effectively
binds the worker to the company that sponsors him or her, and makes it
difficult for the worker to truly test the job market. Even if you're
paid reasonably well, indentured servitude is still indentured
servitude.

The shortage of tech workers has many causes, including the criminal
way this nation has treated public education in recent years, and the
related unwillingness of American youngsters to study engineering,
math and science. Our universities, meanwhile, are the best in the
world in those fields -- and some of the world's best students in
those disciplines flock here for degrees, graduate and undergraduate.

We need to care about our own kids a lot more than we do today, and
make sure the ones with the aptitude and interest go into those
subjects. But we should also be encouraging the best and brightest
from the rest of the world to come here -- and stay. They'll fuel our
economy in the short and long term. It's sheer insanity to shoo away
the very people who'll be our fiercest competitors in a few years.

So let's modify a couple of things:

After an H-1B worker has a year on the job here and shown the ability
to support herself for the long term, give her a green card. Make her
a permanent resident and let her put those skills on the market for
real. Let's also give green cards to the university graduates who have
the skills we need.

But let's also extract something in return from the technology
companies, who collectively comprise the wealthiest industry in
history: a promise, backed by real money, to help train and retrain
the Americans who have the smarts and will to do these jobs. The
industry has a well-deserved reputation for using up its workers and
spitting them out -- and it needs to change a few of its ways.

I have no doubt that the industry, reveling in its new-found political
clout, will get what it wants. Look at what the tech folks scored with
the recent enactment of a law making it harder to sue over year 2000
problems. That was quite the gift for the industry, although on
balance the law is probably a net positive.

But as many commentators have pointed out, the law gives the most
protection to the vendor companies that have been the most
irresponsible. When a company licenses new or recently developed
software that has Y2K problems, it should be much more liable than a
company that sold non-Y2K-compliant software two decades ago, long
before most people were even considering the potential problem.

Then again, this is an industry that routinely and knowingly sells
defective goods. And now, of course, in proposed state-level
legislation called the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act,
the software industry is lobbying to remove what little leverage
customers have today. Stay tuned for more on that subject.

It all makes you wonder: What would the technology crowd do without
government interference?
_________________________________________________________________

Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. Visit
Dan's Web page (www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/columns/gillmor). E-mail:
dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. PGP
fingerprint: FE68 46C9 80C9 BC6E 3DD0 BE57 AD49 1487 CEDC 5C14.