Let me preface this question with some info on myself. I am a small business owner, a heavy equipment/diesel mechanic. I have not prepared my computer for y2k, I don't know how or what to do. But, my business does not depend on this electronic contraption. We can go on even if it blows up or melts down. We are preparing personally but thats it. I won't be computer compliant on Jan 1, 2000. I'll probalby just turn it on and watch what happens. If we have electricity, which we will have because we have a gen set. Question: Will any of you "code heads" admit that the project/ projects that you are working on at this time will not be finished? I read a lot of you saying that your bunch will be ready but the other guys won't be. What's up? That is equal to us mechanics saying we can fix it but nobody else can. You don't have to name names. I know your aliasses. I'm not trolling or flaming. Not trying to pick a fight. I admit that I won't be compliant. But I'm just an ant compared to you big system guys.

-- dozerdoctor (dozerdoc@yahoo.com), July 22, 1999

Answers

I'm just one of many you'll hear from, Doze, but you can't get that answer from me. I've worked remediation for the past 6 years and saw the market fold for those needs (large systems) in the last year. We finished everything that needed to be done everywhere we went. We're all out of work now, as companies have frozen their Y2k-compliant systems to other maintenance requests. Cory, Big-Dog and others have different stories to tell.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 22, 1999.

Anita: What do you mean by "the market fold" exactly? Are you saying that there is no demand for Y2K remediation in large companies? How does this jibe with the fact that a number of different surveys show a large percentage of companies not finished with their code remediation? Also what do you mean by companies having frozen their Y2K work? Are you saying they're all finished, totally compliant, and they're not doing any further work? What kind of companies do you refer to?

-- cody varian (cody@y2ksurvive.com), July 22, 1999.

Dozer: your business does indeed depend on this electronic contraption because if your customers can't function because their contraptions are malfunctioning in 2000, you won't have any business. There is an enormously complex supply chain in the construction industry (I'm a former contractor), much of which stretches overseas, and even if we miraculously get everything compliant here in the US, the rest of the world will take our economy down with theirs next year.

-- cody varian (cody@y2ksurvive.com), July 22, 1999.

Cody:

Market-fold means "market collapse." All the predictions of contractors and programmers in general making big bucks off Y2k work never came to pass. In OUR area, the remediation is complete. This includes private companies and municipalities. This is NOT true in other areas of the country, yet they're not seeking us out either. We're just laying around, spending our savings, or (in my case) my kids' college funds. Hmmm...I lost your response. If I missed anything, please ask again.

Since this seems to be a right-wing-oriented forum, I'll add one more thing here (just because it's late and it's been on my mind for a while now.) The media in the last two years has hyped how few programmers we had to handle Y2k. It was NEVER enough. Immigration was extended to include X folks to help with the problem. I'm currently seeing 15-20 good programmers out of work and I'm STILL seeing these press-releases regarding how we have no one to do the work...............end of jingoistic rant.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 23, 1999.

Anita,

I find what you are saying here to be extraordinary. Mind boggling! No more work? No need to be "available" during the rollover? Or are you just saying that there is no work available to *you*?

Dozer,

Why not read some of Cory Hamasaki's stuff, or Lane Core's thoughts and essays. There are plenty of programmers that are deeply concerned.

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), July 23, 1999.

I've been in IT for 25 years. In management for the last 15 of those. For the last 15 years, we've had a standard that called for every program to be written with 4 digit years. We had a tough so and so in quality assurance that checked every program before it went into production. I thought we wouldn't have any problem when this issue first showed up on my radar 6 years ago. Just for fun, I ran a test... every single program crashed. It turns out that our common date handling routine rejected the year 2000 as an invalid date. Even after that was fixed, it wouldn't recognize 2/29/2000 as a valid date.

So I began dedicating staff to it 6 years ago. We've corrected and tested all our programs. They are all in production. We got a different team to set-up a logical partition on our mainframe, so we could "boot it" with future dates. (This is often referred to as time machine testing).

The new team spent over a year completing the test. Most of the time and effort was spent setting up the LPAR and aging the 300 files to future dates so we could run each test. We're done. End to end testing completed on schedule. (I feel bad for companies that think that they can accomplish this level of testing in a couple of months. It ain't gonna happen.)

Has the team been released for other duties? No... Testing is not binary. It is not yes or no. It is an exercise of diminishing returns. The first few bugs are easy to find. But those little suckers just keep getting more and more difficult to find. I'll keep my team in place until they aren't finding any more bugs.

What difference can a few bugs make? Aren't bugs usually fixed in a couple of hours or so? What are you worried about... There is a huge difference in the usual production abend caused by a bad record or some cross footing being out of tolerance. Those are what usually happens at night, you delete the bad record, restore and rerun. The difference in Y2K is that the problem may be more fundamental. It may go the heart of the system. It may take a system expert weeks to fix. Meanwhile files have been corrupted which will take a system expert days to figure out. On one particularly bad year end, we had two of those kind of bugs. It took my whole staff three weeks to fix. It was touch and go for a while. According to Gartner, and their statistics for bugs found in remediated code, we will go into Y2K with about 3,000 bugs. Certainly, only a few of those will manifest themselves, and a subset of those will be the deeper, more corrupting in nature. If we get more than two or three of those we're in deep sh*t. (Oh, did I mention that we've been downsized. My staff is half what it was when we struggled with the two errors.)

Personally, I'm preparing for 3 months.

-- worried (a@a.net), July 23, 1999.

Cody, Anita: What do you mean by "the market fold" exactly? Are you saying that there is no demand for Y2K remediation in large companies? How does this jibe with the fact that a number of different surveys show a large percentage of companies not finished with their code remediation? Also what do you mean by companies having frozen their Y2K work? Are you saying they're all finished, totally compliant, and they're not doing any further work? What kind of companies do you refer to? There's a couple of reasons this happened:

1) big iron is a very small market (compared to the wider PC/Server world).

2) Many companies brought in consultants to do the really ugly grunt stuff, then got rid of them and are using internal staff to complete the job to save money.

3) They really are Done (or at least Done with their big iron work).

4) They absolutely HAD to CLAIM they were compliant and couldn't do that while continuing to pay outside help ("Of course we're done, we fired all the consultants"). Now they're praying REAL HARD that their internal staff is up to the task of finishing up before rollover. -TECH32-

-- TECH32 (TECH32@NOMAIL.COM), July 23, 1999.

anita, just to help the kids go to college, i here recruitement ads on the radio here in Monkey County Maryland for y2k-remediators(?) all the time. i don't program so i can't make big bucks.:( but if you're willing to travel a bit...just trying to help. sarah

-- sarah (qubr@aol.com), July 23, 1999.

"big iron is a very small market (compared to the wider PC/Server world)."

There are about 50,000 IBM/390 mainframes out there. This doesn't include AS/400, Unisys, and I don't know how many other "big iron" class machines.

However, the average "mainframe" runs thousands of programs, most of which are custom written, based on my 31 years in the business. How many programs does the average PC run? How many of these are custom written, not off-the-shelf? It's a different game. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), July 23, 1999.

Anita said (paraphrasing) "remediation work market for large systems folded in the last year". That's it.

Some organisations have finished their Y2K remediation work (or at least as close to it as they're going to get - one of programming's truisms is that "there is ALWAYS another bug"). However, they've reached the point of drastically diminishing returns. They could go on spending scads of money, with no guarantee of finding anything - so they don't. Anita's out of a job.

Others have used contractors as hired guns, or even just hired hands - bring them in to supplement their own staff, break the back of the problem, drop back to their establishment figure when the end is in sight. There may be remediation work still going on, but they will KNOW that it will be completed before Y2K or they wouldn't have let the contractors go. Anita's out of a job.

Others again are still trying to get a massive remediation job completed. They may have to drop all but their core business functions, and exercise triage even on those. However, at this stage they CANNOT afford to take on more staff - there comes a point where throwing more people at a problem just makes it worse. They'd have to train the people in their systems, let them practice, come up to speed, supervise them all this time (losing the productivity of the people who do know what's going on). There's also the chance that despite how vital this is, they don't have the money, or even (criminally) that they haven't been allowed the budget. Anyway, they can't take Anita on.

There are some smaller organisations with smaller systems still undertaking remediation that could use more experienced people for a time. However, they don't have "big iron". This isn't Anita's area, so no job.

And there are some people who are just ignoring the problem and hoping it won't hurt them. This is roughly like ignoring a suspicious lump - "if I pretend it's not there, it won't hurt me". The least they could do - the asbsolute least they must do to have a hope of satisfying a court that they tried to avert Y2K problems, and so aren't liable for the damages they would otherwise cause or did cause - is to talk to an expert (ideally their system supplier) and ask their advice, AND DIARISE IT. If that isn't possible - if their system was done by "Fly By Night Developments" or some such - then they need to get together with a staff member who knows something of the computer, and a consultant, and talk about it, and either take the consultant's advice or get a second opinion, AND DIARISE IT. Yes, that means spending money. YES, THEY DO HAVE TO DO IT, or accept that any little Y2K-related problem may financially destroy their business, leave them legally liable for enormous damages, and bankrupt them. The answer may be that everything's fine, and you don't need to do anything. It may be that the answer isn't known, but waiting and seeing won't do any harm. Or you may need to do something. But if you don't talk to an expert, that lump may kill you horribly. The investment of a little time and money is surely worthwhile here. However, Anita can't address this area either.

Business people and managers - large, small, and dozerdoctors, which area are you in?

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), July 23, 1999.

Don:

I'd agree for the most with your appraisal of the situation. Despite my "polly" status on this board, my posts are NOT meant to extrapolate on MY experiences to other areas of the country.

Sysman:

I'm not convinced that there are only 50,000 large mainframes. I'd have to seek out some information I found a while back presented by Tim Oxler (another telecommuting contractor who works out of St. Louis), but I think your figures are low there. Remember also that Critt started a thread lately pointing out an article by someone that stated that legacy systems were in deep doo-doo...insufficient source code, not enough expertise to handle the problem, systems that were too complex to be handled, etc. Thanks for the reminder to get back to that one.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 23, 1999.

Sarah:

Thanks for trying to help. I can't leave the area right now. As mentioned in another post, I moved my 86-year old mom down to Texas from Illinois two years ago. If I don't pop in to see her every 3rd day or so, she considers me negligent. She lives at a type-B facility nearby. In addition, my oldest daughter is moving back home August 1. My days of being able to travel world-wide are over for the present. [sigh] I'm not particularly fond of being of the "sandwiched" generation, but we all roll with the punches.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 23, 1999.

Anita, are you preparing?

-- Linda A. (adahi@muhlon.com), July 23, 1999.

Linda:

Preparedness is no longer the topic of this forum. If you'd like to see the contributions I've made to the Preparedness forum, they're there for the taking.

-- Anita (spoonera@msn.com), July 23, 1999.