there are days that i realy want to work hard and prepair , and then there are days that i look at the problemand ask my self if ithere is a chance that i am being tricked in to thinking that a lot of this is hores dump .

and nothing is realy going to happen , , not sure how to take this , i know there are days of depresion and then there are days of extream engery.

any one else, are we inthe right direction , i guess i am just looking to see if i am the only one out there . i see that the numbers keep growing , but its still hard to meet any one who knows what you are saying ,

mongo

-- Ron (mongo@earthling.net), December 21, 1998

Answers

Mongo, I know what you mean bud. Thats why I spend so much time online. It's the only place to go for reinforcement. Even though my experience tells me that there is no way out and that there should be no doubt that we are in some real deeeep doodoo, there are still days when I have a hard time accepting my fate.

During my IT career, one of my best assets as a professional was also my worst asset as a person. Pessimism. I would never accept the fact that all bases were covered. I would keep turning the rocks over looking for the bugs or that one piece that was missed. With Y2K, there is no need to turn the rocks over, hell its hard to find the rocks there are so many bugs.

Intellectually I have accepted it. Emotionally, its a day to day struggle requiring constant effort to stay focused.

MoVe Immediate

-- MVI (vtoc@aol.com), December 21, 1998.

MVI: What was your IT career and why did you leave it? With your IT experience, do you think y2k will be a global disaster of historic proportions or something less, and why?

-- cody varian (cody@y2ksurvive.com), December 21, 1998.

Hang in there, Ron.

-- Mom Here (Mom@here.net), December 21, 1998.

Ron Right now you need that job more than ever. It is not a bad thing to have a food and water backup plan even if there were not a problem lurking in the year to come. It is just a wise thing to do and gives one a pshyclogical secure feeling once you get going. You need that job of your to buy those things that will help you when a disater does take place. I figure if Y2K is at it's worse I will eat and if nothing happens at all I will eat. So spend those worry energies on organizing and keeping that job. It will be ok - don't ever give up.

Duane

-- Duane (Duane24062@aol.com), December 21, 1998.

Take "time out's" Ron. It's called balance. It's part of prudent preparation.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), December 22, 1998.

cody, A brief synopsis of my career would go something like this 25 years, positions held are programmer, systems analyst, sytems engineer, hardware consultant, Project Manager, Systems Manager, I also spent some time as an independant consultant. Industries include health care insurance, telecommunications, and mortgage banking. Mostly IBM mainframe platforms.

Reason I left.

I worked for one the major players in the telecommunications industries. The company was involved in fraudulent billing practices on government contracts. I found out about it, they knew that I found out about it, and they knew that I was not gonna play their game. They tried to set me up on a bogus deal (does sexual misconduct sound familiar). My wife was aware of it and also my alibi. I resigned rather than fight it and took several documents as proof of their activity. I sought legal advice after my resignation. My attorney spoke with his contacts in the justice department and they said, "We have so many similar cases with this company, that your client will have to stand in line". The Feds turn their backs on this type of criminal activity all the time. Too embarrassing and too hard to explain to the public.

Do I think its a global disaster? Yes, I agree with Infomagic.

The Programmer Mentality

For the most part, the IT industry has what I call the "programmer mentality". Most IT managers were programmers at some point in their career. Bad programmers, but good politicians and they (and their subordinates) continue to see every problem a just "writin' a little code". The coding phase is about 20% on average and this explains to a great extent the reason why projects are late and overbudget. An analogy of this would be a residential building contractor possesssing only the skills of a carpenter. After you get the house up, you realize that you need to go back in and lay the plumbing, electrical, etc.

Project management skills:

Most middle managers don't have even the basic project management skills. Most rely on some canned PM tools used to report the financial status of projects and not to track actual progress. They wouldn't know Pert/CPM if it jumped up and bit them in the ass. And since neither they nor their subordinates have the ability or skill to view the big picture most projects are in trouble before they start (think of the building contractor analogy). One additional item to look for on Y2K is when project planning spills over into the year 2000. I expect a lot of these canned PM tools to go south when this happens. Either the systems will not be compliant or the manner in which the data is recorded or organized will cause these systems to fail. This is significant in my opinion. The effort required to maintain this data in large. Think of a mini charlotte's web. Thousands of interdependancies (sub-task, task, phase, etc) to reconstruct on a large scale project.

Diagnostic Skills:

The diagnostic skills of the industry as a whole is deplorable. You can show a person the same set of conditions resulting in the same failure on several different occasions and they will respond differently (and incorrectly) each time. I never could understand it. Its like their memory is suspended, faulty, or nonexistant. Trying to diagnose and fix problems after 01/01/2000 is a joke. It'll never happen.

Testing:

Forget about it. Y2K is calling on programming resources outside of their basic application specific experience. A programmer with primarily financial system experiences hasn't a clue about the specific testing needs of a system designed to adjudicate health care claims. The burden of testing will fall primarily on end users. This occurs even in the best of times. But, it makes unit and systems testing next to impossible because the programmers and analysts do not have the knowledge.

As Infomagic stated in one of his writings. Just putting all this stuff in production if and when it is finished is a gargantuan task, and extremely error prone. To borrow from the building contractor analogy again, after you build the house and the customer is satisfied with it, lets break it down into its component parts and move it to that location across the street, reassemble it, and have it function in the same manner it did before you moved it.

IT is a very undesciplined industry. The above things happen all the time. Y2K is different. It cannot be postponed.

MoVe Immediate.

-- MVI (vtoc@aol.com), December 22, 1998.