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  • Subject: Re: What after Year2000
  • From: DAsmussen@xxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1997 22:17:04 -0400 (EDT)

Booth, Al,

In a message dated 97-06-13 01:27:22 EDT, you write:

> >     I just wanted to share my ideas with all the people in the list.
>  >Recently I have attended one of our company's business meetings. Someone
>  >from the front rows asked the speaker abt the future of all the systems,
>  >resources, people after Year2000. For that the speaker (who is one of the
>  >top execs in our company) said that the Year2000 market will be there
even
>  >after Year2000. It will be there for 5 to 6 years after that. I am
>  >wondering as to what the people will do with Y2K projects once, the
>  >inevitable crash has already occured. As someone rightly pointed out in
>  >earlier discussions, if you are not going to start by September this
year,
>  >you are dead in the business and the systems are going to crash at the
>  >stroke of 12:00 midnight Dec 31st, 1999. I thought of asking the speaker
as
>  >to what will be the Y2K work even after the crash (year200) but thought
>  >that was not a good platform to raise the question. As the discussion on
>  >Y2K is picking up momentum, I too wanted to share my ideas and insights.
>  >Can anybody tell me how far the speaker's statement is true. I am not
>  >judging anybody nor trying to grade someone. I just want to know the real
>  >future of all these year2000 work after the crash. Thanx in advance for
any
>  >suggestions.
>  >
>  My opinion is the following:
>  
>  1.   There will be chaos on Monday January 3, 2000.  Most applications that
>  do date arithmetic with 6.0S dates will currently do addition properly, or
>  can be modified without much effort.  Applications that do date
subtraction
>  (A/R aging, interest calculations) will be tough to fix.  

It is ALREADY occuring in many areas.  If you manufacture products that
require expiration/retest dating, or have lead times of more than 3 years,
you've seen it too.  Anyone besides me have a VISA card that expires
12/31/1999?  Anyone have a credit card that expires later?

>  2.   Some companies will not furvive, or will be all screwed up for an
>  extended period of time.

Agreed.

>  3.   From an AS/400 perspective, the implementation of date data types is
too
>  little, too late.  Most people will not go to date data types for Y2K,
>  although if IBM fixes the problems, they may be ultimately implemented.

Agreed again.  It's sad, because these might have been widely embraced had
IBM not introduced the performance issue or required "Special Values" for
dates considered invalid.

>  4.   After surviving Jan 2000, with business running normally, many will go
>  back to 6.0S dates, and not care anymore.

I disagree with this.  Others feel free to comment, but I cannot envision ANY
business running "normally" if they haven't prepared for Y2K.  DASD is cheap,
and us "old timers" (not that I'm that old, I've just been doing this
professionally for 17+ years and was busy with the old Altair systems prior
to that) looking to save every byte of both DASD and memory are on the
decline.  The main problem I see is that the new people that don't know the
system making decisions about how best to implement it.

>  5.   There will be a glut of programmers available by the time everything is
>  fixed.  The less qualified will be out of work, and there will be downward
>  pressure on the salary market.

I give a "qualified" agreement here as well.  There WILL be a glut of
programmers, and the less qualified WILL be out of work.   Y2K has put people
in demand that normally would not be able to work.  I disagree about the
"downward pressure on the salary market".

Software continues to play a larger and larger role in our (US) society.
 This is already spreading abroad.  While the pressure to get out the "latest
and greatest" release of application/OS software will continue to increase,
the available pool of competent talent will remain stagnant or decrease.  I
am a firm believer that the ability to program well is an inherent talent,
not unlike professional sports people (we can only HOPE that the salaries
eventually reach that level (-:!).  I remember an article in the '70's that
stated that only 5% of the people on Earth could program and out of those,
only 3% could do it well.  Some people can do it, most folks can't.  All the
DeVry Institutes, ECPI sites, colleges, and universities with IS courses
cannot change this.  I have some other ideas on the subject, but I'm saving
them for my book :-)...

JMHO,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-Mail:  DAsmussen@AOL.COM

"I think of life as a good book.  The more you get into it, the more it
begins to make sense." -- Harold S. Kushner
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