http://www.kiyoinc.com/death.html

Cory Hamasaki: "I expect between 1993 and 2003 we will kill 10-20% of the legacy programmers. Between their average age of 50 - 60, the stress, lack of exercise, and bad diet, the population of expert legacy programmers will be smaller at the end of Y2K than at the beginning. Look around at your next team meeting, of the five of you, one will not see the systems run in 2003."

Sobering comment isn't it?

-- bardou (bardou@baloney.com), July 20, 1999

Answers

Yes it is sobering.

But not nearly so sobering as the thought that the entire generation of folks who last lived off the land and who have had first hand experience living on the food they and their families produced - are already mostly dead. If I thought those damn programmers were going to be any use to us at all I would be more sobered. As it is now I consider that those expert legacy programmers blew it. They sold us out to keep management happy. If they all drop then they have no one to blaim but themselves and I will not particularly mourn their passing.

-- R (riversoma@aol.com), July 21, 1999.

Maybe we can eat them

-- R (riversoma@aol.com), July 21, 1999.

We legacy programmers argued for 4-digit years as far back as 1975. I personally started using them in 1984 on all systems, management costs be damned.

In 1975 the space to store a copy of Windows 95 cost about $400k in 1975 dollars for the first year, less in following years. This is not peanuts. But we saw the risks rising year by year, some of us. To management it was a question of coding with 2-digit years or not having the money to write the system at all. Many programmers thought it would be better to not write the system than to do it with 2-digit years.

By 1990 it was criminally irresponsible to write with 2-digit years, but Microsoft was writing non-compliant software as recently as last fall, if I recall correctly. Other software companies were doing the same. This is criminal stupidity on the part of the young, leading-edge geeks.

Some of my generation blew it, as did some of the current crop.

I gave a Y2k talk some months ago, and a lawyer in the crowd couldn't stop talking about the class action suit he could see, based on implied warranties. Gimme a break. I'm trying to keep these people alive, and the legal beagle wants to talk about lawsuits.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), July 21, 1999.

"the last generation to live off the land is dead"???

I think you are indulging in wishful thinking - I am not dead yet (tho I just turned 46) and neither is my father - who says he MAY give up farming this year as it hurts to work that hard at 83. And I will not go 'back to the land' unless I am forced into it.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), July 21, 1999.

Since 'a' seems to have nominated Hamasaki as Vice-Chairman of the Department of Key Omissions and Hidden Assumptions, let's look at this carefully.

1) We are not told the *normal* mortality rate of legacy programmers, so we have no basis for comparison.

2) We are assuming that *any* mortality within this group must be y2k related, knowing that any such relationship isn't remotely possible to ascertain.

3) The "look around" method conveniently fails to account for retirements, career changes, or the accelerating trend away from legacy systems and toward client-server and other atchitectures.

4) Even such a woolly and unverifiable prediction (Hamasaki says "will kill") has been changed by bardou into present tense ("kills"), as though this were already the case, or a foregone conclusion.

Clearly Hamasaki's maunderings aren't sobering, since it failed to have that effect on either bardou or riversoma.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), July 21, 1999.