Can retired programmers be of any help on a part-time basis?

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I retired in 1990, at age 62 to care for my sister. Younger siblings are doing that now. I'm not "super-mom" anymore, and my former gifted IQ may be down some points, but I can still think, and can cope with the boring parts of routine coding, which some male "geniuses" are not willing to do in many cases. If I could work half-days, I'd love to do something to help. I could even do documentation. As I recall, this took twice as long as producing the working code (I included a lot of documentation in my source code.) My "techno-babble" is rusty, but one picks that up again rather quickly. People in my age group were brought up on WWII patriotism, idealism and sacrifice. I'm willing to bet there are a goodly number of former programmers out there who could do a good job and the extra money would come in handy.

-- Hilda Rose Zahn Spagna (Hspagna@aol.com), November 07, 1999

Answers

Hilda:

1) Unfortunately, the business world has been less than willing to turn to retired (or even older) programmers much. "They" generally want computer science degrees, modern languages, etc., in addition to COBOL, Fortran, etc. Actually, I think they've been shooting themselves in the foot by doing this!

2) At this point in time, given Brook's Law ("Adding more more people to a late programming project will only make it later."), I would not want to add more staff to a Y2K project...

3) However! There are many small businesses out there that have not upgraded their systems. There are many non-profit institutions that have not upgraded their systems. They definitely need help. They need consultants, more often than employees. They may not pay as much (non-profits may not have any budget). But there is as much work out there as we can do (unfortunately, more than we can do) in the time remaining.

I sympathize with you...my 1/3 century in DP is not exactly embraced, either!

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), November 08, 1999.


If you can't find anyone to employ you now, just wait. After the 1st, when many companies discover just how bad their remediation was, (or how much they should have done), I expect demand to pick up.

In fact, if I didn't have a full-time job right now, I'd learn to remediate PC's. Get all the BIOS-fixit programs and Y2K diagnostics you can. If you have friends with small/medium sized businesses, find out what software they use, and check it out for them. Get upgrades wherever available, and keep copies.

After the 1st rolls around, you'll be ready to help out. Give it away if you like, or charge whatever the traffic will bear.

-- Michael Goodfellow (mgoodfel@best.com), November 11, 1999.


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