Howdy--

Just heard a troubling bit of news down here in Dallas. As some of you know, I am a corporate recruiter. Just had a candidate for a high level IT job with a client (consulting firm) return from an on-site interview. In his short walk through the client's server room he identified six Y2K issues. Accounting package not compliant, operating system not compliant, PBX not compliant, assorted hardware items not compliant.

Hiring guy said that they had been certified compliant by former IT manager back in April. Yes, the one we are trying to replace. Left sometime in the summer.

Cannot and will not reveal players names. I just wonder how many other firms out there are in a similar boat.

Even if I find the right guy for these people....what are the odds I get paid?

Hmmmm,

-- William in Dallas (bcheek@onramp.net), November 11, 1999

Answers

"Even if I find the right guy for these people....what are the odds I get paid?"

Now how in the world can you find the right guy for these people, unless you mean an undertaker?

-- Kurt Ayau (Ayau@iwinet.com), November 11, 1999.

Does your guy think that the Operating System and the Accounting package can be done in time?? I mean, there must be updates for the OS, possibly the Accounting package also.

Anyone heard of temporary service bureaus to brute force paper & pencil invoice, billing data through a generalized Accounting/ report generator to keep these businesses in business and buy some time next year??

I mean...there must be some workarounds with PCs to help at least SOME of these folks...26 Federal Days left...

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@ It's ALL going away in January.com), November 11, 1999.

I know for sure that MY job-search plans are on hold 'till the beginning of next year. And it looks like if I am still employed then, it won't be in my present job-probably doing something much simpler. The pay may not be in Federal Reserve Debt Notes and I'll be in a different geographical area. We'll see in a couple of months won't we!

JJ

-- Jeremiah Jetson (laterthan@uthink.y2k), November 11, 1999.

K. Stevens:

I manage a temp employment office. Where do we find the people??? In my county of 200,000 I don't think all the temp agencies TOGETHER could find 30 people in a weeks time who can do manual bookkeeping.

Sorry, it won't work. Not unless half of the companies are shutting down........

William, thanks for the update. How's business?

-- mushroom (mushroom_bs_too_long@yahoo.com), November 11, 1999.

Hey--

Mushroom: business is--interesting...lots of clients, hard to find candidates. In re the work around issue, yeah, my guy said he could get the job done. But it would be tough, and what troubles me is not that the problems are intractable--they can be fixed--it's that the client didn't know they had a problem. You see, someone had certified they were Y2K compliant.

And they weren't.

Multiply by X firms across the country, and Y firms around the world.

I'm not pessimistic. Right now I'm watching a PBS special on D-Day. Lots of Americans handling tough problems. I believe we can handle this too.

But it will be tough.

My best to all,

-- William in Dallas (bcheek@onramp.net), November 11, 1999.

Isn't cpr in Dallas? He insists everything's fixed, and Y2k is over. Perhaps he's available to work his miracles. Give him a buzz. He's easy to find.

-- Go (p@c.k), November 12, 1999.

I was drilling PhD student in EE who just came back to school after working for a small software/website/who-knows company about y2k and he was Clueless with a capital 'C'. Curiously (another capital 'C'), he said his former employer would surely have bugs cause they hired an outside group to do the fixes and this group was totally incompetent. Aparently, his employer was nervous cause all they wanted was the legal trail anyway. They would FOF. I suggested that was a bit arrogant. He couldn't see my point.

-- Dave (aaa@aaa.com), November 12, 1999.

Yes - I was thinking of good ole CPR too - I'm sure he could get this company fixed right nicely.....maybe CPR was the former IT boss.

Your pay from these guys, if they are in as serious a trouble as indicated, might definitely be in doubt.

But then again, so are their January sales, their January utility bills, paychecks, IRS reports adn W-2/W-4's, their vender payments, their customer recepits, ...... repeat in as many other places as this problem occurs.

What's troubling is that only 40% of small/medium businesses are "self-declared" compliant, and here is evidence that "self-declared compliance" may be nothing more than "self-deluded compliance"....

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), November 12, 1999.