Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 3
"January 11, 1998 - 719 days to go." WRP59
(c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this article as long as this entire document is reproduced in
its entirety including this notice. I do not grant permission to
a commercial publisher to reprint this in print media.
As seen in
USENET:comp.software.year-2000
http://www.elmbronze.demon.co.uk/year2000/
http://www.kiyoinc.com/HHResCo.html
Please fax or email copies of this to your geek pals, especially those
idiots who keep sending you lightbulb, blonde, or Bill Gates jokes,
and urban legends like the Arizona rocket car story.
If you have a Y2K webpage, feel free to host the Weather Reports.
Don't forget- April 2, 3 1998, Geek Out.
1. Recruiter email
2. More Reader's mailbox
3. Vik's Law of Acquisition # 10.
4. Another Freenet down.
5. Stock market???
6. CCCC
-------------- Readers Mailbox ----------
This email came in. I have deleted the references that identify the author
but the general sense is intact. my reply follows.
>
> Cory,
> I am a (dreaded) recruiter in Dallas, and have been religiously reading
> your Y2K weather report for quite a while now. I agree with you that
> the rates are definitely going up, but not quite as much out here and in
> the Midwest. Anyway, how long do you think this shortage of mainframe
> crankers is going to last? Quite a few people seem to think that as
> soon as the Y2K issue is "solved" (for lack of a much better word),
> around 2003 or so, that all of the MF people are going to be back where
> they were before the issue was realized to be a problem. I have also
> heard the opinion that the need for mainframe folks will continue to be
> strong long after this crisis. I can definitely see both sides, but
> tend to lean towards the latter, since everyone (most everyone anyway)
> running the big iron is spending (or at least looking at spending) the
> money to fix their code. I was also wondering if you thought it was to
> late to try and get in on cranking side of things, and where would
> someone with no industry experience, but would be willing to put in the
> hours if given a chance, go about getting a little hands on?
> I would appreciate any advice you could give. I would have posted on
> the Newsgroup, but I didn't want to clutter it up with non relevant
> messages.
That doesn't stop me. My middle name is irrelevant, or was that
irreverant.
I'm guessing that the staff shortage will end in 2003 and rates will deflate slightly,
that is, 70% of a Windows, Unix, C/S programmer. Once the systems are fixed, they'll
stay fixed.
There will still be mainframe jobs, salaries will not collapse, the people who choose
to remain mainframe programmers will earn good but not top salaries. It will be like
the late 1980s. Salaries will not collapse because a portion of the remediation work
is being done by 1) off shore factories, 2) retirees who will return to retirement, 3)
programmers who can do both mainframe and C/S work. A percentage of the job force
will leave on their own.
Getting started is easy for you. Get a couple books, the free ADTOOLS COBOL compiler,
as a recruiter you see the REQs come in. Find an entry level REQ, maybe for a tester,
or QA co-ordinator and place yourself. If you can work part time and still do your
recruiting, great. Be the person submitting test jobs and logging in the results from
7:AM to 1:PM a 7 hour day then do your recruiting in the afternoon and evenings.
A lot of the work will be co-ordinating the tests, cranking out daily and weekly
status tables for the programmers and management. Anybody can do that but this would
get you in the door.
I will incorporate your anonymized email and this response into a future
Weather Report.
-------- Reader's mailbox 2 ---------------
Here's the bad news about the Washington Post Mega job issue, January 11,
1998.
>
> Cory, I just got the Washington Post mega-job issue and began licking my
> chops in anticipation of mainframe Y2K ads. Was I ever in for a shock.
> Out of the 50 pages I counted less than 20 ads that referenced Y2K. You
It was over 50 pages, there was another 3-4 pages of computer programmer jobs
sprinkled in the regular classifieds as well as in the engineering section following
the computer section.
> could have fit them all on 1 or at most 2 pages. Seems like everything
> was focused on new development in sexy languages like VB and HTML. Maybe
> you're getting ready to address this in a WRP but something just doesn't
> add up here. Either:
>
> 1) We are in an unbelievable state of denial and are doomed come
> 2000-01-01
>
This is my guess and I will bring this up. I know people who work for large
corporations with serious Y2K problems that are not being addressed. I am not ready
to go public with this info but if you ask around, you'll find people who will talk
off the record.
> or
>
> 2) Y2K is really all hype, mainframes are dying, and Java rules the world
>
>
> If everything that I have read about Y2K is true then there should have
> been 30 pages of $100k/yr Cobol/assembler/PL1/etc. jobs. Any thoughts?
>
It should be more than $100K/year. Two years ago, the industry watchers were
predicting $250K/year for COBOL and more for Assembler and PL/I. This has not
generally happened except a few consultants are billing numbers like that.
Make no mistake, there are companies working on Y2K as if their future
depended upon it. Others are pretending that Y2K isn't a problem. I don't
know if it's the lots-a time left or the I'm as dumb as a rock syndrome.
Either way, the work isn't getting done.
Now this doesn't mean absolutely no one is working on it. From working the
DC wizard's whisper line, I gather that only one organization in 10 is
addressing their Y2K issues. Fannie Mae is, so is Giant Food, Citicorp,
Geico, and a couple others. The feds aren't, and of course, the DC city
government is more concerned about looting and theft... that is looting
itself and stealing from the DC residents.
-------- Vik's Law of Acquistion # 10 ---------------
10. How do I benefit from this Y2K thing?- This is the only question
worth spending any time on. Two suggestions- Think big and act fast.
This is going to be a rapidly changing market. Leverage your skills and
network like crazy. Don't spend time "educating" the clueless or arguing
with the "all-is-well" types.
---- expanding on Vik's law.
719 days to go, Are you networking like crazy? Are you attending local
Y2K meetings? Have you started one. Local libraries, restraurants,
churches, and other organizations frequently have meeting rooms available
at low or no cost.
Get your name out as a Y2K problem solver. In the 1970's, I helped Wayne
Green, the guy who started Byte magazine, carry his booth out of a show.
Wayne said, "the world has never seen anything like this microcomputer
thing, fortunes, huge fortunes will be made." This was before the Mac,
before Visicalc, before Lotus, before the IBM PC and servers. Wayne was
right about this one.
Y2K is bigger than the microcomputer revolution. It is all of computing,
at risk, for a brief moment in time. All of computing, 35 years of
mainframes, 25 years of midrange, 15 years of Pee Cees, everything, Unix,
embeddeds, applications, systems, hardware, all at risk and someone is
waiting to pay you a fortune.
Some of you might have a hard time imagining getting a check for five
thousand dollars for a week's work but this will be the norm as Y2K
approaches. Did I say five? Try seventy-five hundred.
Don't kid yourself, this won't a nice soft job where you stroll in a nine,
nine-thirty, check your email for half an hour, get some coffee, scope out
the geekette with the pretty eyes, find out how the hardware kid did with
his new SMP home machine, diddle a little code with a Netscape window open
to c.s.y2k looking for a new song.
It will be a deathmarch, when you come in at 7:25AM, a guy who looks like
me will start in on you, "Where the F*** are the modified files, we've been
trying to run SZR145 and the inputs are still unexpanded." But, you'll
say, at the 8:pm meeting last Monday, we decided to go windowing with a
2034 fixed pivot date. "F***-S***, I missed that one, we did the entire
SZR-one-four subsystem wrong. This screws up the overseas people too."
That's when the Horn-hair jumps in, "You idiots, we were already 4 days
late." The veins are pounding on his temples, "now I gotta go the morning
IT project meeting and get reamed again. F***-you very much. And plan to
stay tonight until we get SZR-one-four to process some data."
You think about leaving but you'll forfeit the hundred grand bonus due in
18 months and anyway the company down the street is working even longer
hours and two programmers there had nervous breakdowns.
So you regress the source off the SILO and start over again.
-------- Another Freenet down. --------------
I have an email account at the DC area freenet, http://www.capaccess.org.
They haven't been online since December 31, 1997. They've been down for 5
days now.
I received an email that the Denver freenet also failed on December 31 and
their failure symptoms are identical. The one time I was able to TELNET to
the freenet, it said my password had expired. Looks like a date problem
that hits Unix based freenet systems.
-------- Stock Market ------------------------
Last week was a bad one for stock and mutual fund investors. Is it time to
bail? I donno, but I sold out last spring and missed a continued rise in
stock prices. Will the market melt down on Monday? Who knows?
If I were still in the market, I'd be scared. Uh-oh, I just remembered, 40%
of my 401(K) accounts are still in mutual funds. Whoa-oh!
-------- Cory's closing clueless comments -
Sorry guys, I'm so clueless that I have little to say.
I am looking for more date-like words that you'd find in a source code.
Check out http://www.ntplx.net/~rgearity any evening, 8-10PM EST. Lots of
hot Y2K talk.
719 days to go.