I went to the behemoth from a little startup and was surprised to discover that all their sw and processes were much, much more outdated and failure prone than at the startup. Nothing is ever straightforward about software.
The funniest (and somewhat unrelated thing) is that we're all supposed to change our passwords every thirty days. What this means of course is that everyone writes their pw down and tapes it to their computer...otherwise, how could you possibly keep anything straight. Which of course means that the system is less safe than ever. LOL.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Munson" <chuck0munson at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sunday, August 1, 2010 8:28:12 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Cobol Is My Hero -- A Reverse Luddism
On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 4:00 PM, michael perelman
<michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote:
> The Sacramento Bee reported that some people in California are wearing
> T-shirts bearing the cryptic words, "Cobol Is My Hero."
>
This sounds like incompetent IT management has been tolerated for too long by the state of California, I spent several years working in an academic IT environment, so I know how incompetent manager bozos get ensconced and allow bullshit to continue for years at a time. It became obvious over time why people cling to academic and government positions with gritty determination--it's comfy work and you can get away with shit that wouldn't fly in the private sector (or as a freelancer).
I know that many old school programmers have retired, but how hard is it to find a few to work part time, or at least train other programmers on the stuff that needs to be done to transfer date to a modern system? All you need to tease out of the older system is stuff you'd put in a database. Or why don't they just start fresh with a modern system and just use the legacy system for records?
I have some understanding of programming, but my skills aren't on a level where I'm an actual programmer. I did work in a software development shop at a university some 15 years ago. We were developing library systems software, which is some of the most complicated code around. One of the big challenges was with "feature bloat", which is what I suspect has blocked efforts to modernize this system in California. Feature bloat is caused by non-programmer staff and managers who keep saying "wouldn't it be nice to have this" during the development process. Yeah, it's cool to add new features, but adding new stuff can be complicated and can be hard to maintain over the years.
The other problem with running complex systems is that you can get locked into a software program or framework. Hopefully, you have some smart IT staff who understand this and who will recommend that you go with something, such as a content management system like Drupal or WordPress, which will be around for years and has a large community to maintain it. Or your IT management might suck and they'll let some young guy program something in Ruby and then leave for greener pasture. Then you have something that is hard to maintain or upgrade.
-- Chuck Munson
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