Fellow Geeks: Do you work on Y2K?

Remember the days when we were all sitting there at our "dumb terminals" emulating a 3270, hardwired to our Big Iron Brother, looking at alter and goto statements, and in core dumps for the offensive data values that caused an 0c7? When there was an outage, it was usually because of the Big Iron going down, or the connection. That was pretty much it. Not much finger pointing.

Now look at when there is a production problem today. All too often, the first thing I see is finger pointing. I hear "It's the client", then "no, it's the server", then no "it's the application software", then no "it's the network", then no "it's the firewall", etc. Nobody wants to fix something until everyone else proves to them that it is really their responsibility. Naturally, this takes time and costs the employer bucks. Since it is a production outage, it does get fixed, but usually not as quickly as in the "good ol' days", at least from what I have seen. More links in the chain. And you have to contact these folks. First you have to find them. They may be in a different state, or country, or telecommuting. And twenty years ago we only had the telephone - no pagers, e-mail, not even an automated response messaging system. Then why now is it such a pain to get a hold of folks sometimes? Maybe you have had a completely different experience in your shop.

Regarding Y2K, what I have been seeing over the last 6 months is what I will call the Application Shuffle. As in finger pointing, the problem is shuffled about. We simply reclassify the app, from needing repair or mission critical, to no longer needing repair or not mission critical. This makes management happy. This shows Progress, even if there is none. It is also bullcrap. The problem has not been solved, it has been shuffled. The Application Shuffle isn't danced by just the private sector either. The DOD is an expert at this. When they got caught at it, they did something even more stupid, they out and out lied - falsifying status reports. Now they have been caught at that too.

Sometimes this shuffle has resulted from an honest mistake: usually an incomplete or flawed assessment for example. Other times I really wonder. I have even seen the same app re-shuffled back to where it was classified originally! Despite this, we are all working hard , and we are making progress. Whether it will be enough or not remains to be seen. I don't even know what "enough" is.

My point in this post is to ask what your experiences are on your Y2K job. Are you doing the Application Shuffle? Do you have any points to make related to Y2K and your job experiences?

-- Rob Michaels (sonofdust@net.com), January 04, 1999

Answers

would love to, but...little problem called a security clearance...and Hey! and who are you calling geek!

-- a (a@a.a), January 04, 1999.