With the NERC report encouraging electric utilities to accelerate their Y2K fixing efforts, I would assume that there will be a lot of openings for computer professionals. We are constantly hearing about COBOL programmers for business systems, but what languages and skills are needed for SCADA and other such industry specific systems?

-- Anonymous, September 21, 1998

Answers

The NERC survey results shows that most of utilities are concentrating on remediation and testing of mission critical systems. These are msotly:

- Energy Control: SCADA/ EMS (mostly FORTRAN and C) - Generation: DCS (mostly C) - System Protection: Meters and Relays (mostly C) - Telecommunication: SCADA, Microwave, Leased lines (mostly C) - Financial: Billing (mostly COBOL)

Of the above systems, only Billing application will be in COBOL. The rest of the systems involves engineers with embedded systems experience. The preferred qualifications are:

- Hardware engineers (Analog, Digital/ Embedded firmware design)) - Software engineers (FORTRAN, C, UNIX, Machine language) - Telecommunication engineers

The above set of personnel should have minimum 10 years experience (development, implementation, debugging and testing) in the areas mentioned earlier.

-- Anonymous, September 21, 1998