Y2K crisis gives new life to old-time programmers

The problem? Getting the workers of the work.

For an industry that has mushroomed by dangling dad-sized salaries before unmarried post-adolescents willing to move anywhere at the drop at the IPO, the graying of high techpresents an intriguing dilemma.

The huge financial institutions that are desperate to get their mainframes on track for the millennium, says Bill Payson, president of Senior Staff 2000, a leading database of elder IT workers, “want full-time people, on-site.”

Frances Nevarez, president of Automation Training Specialists – which offers training to programmers for Y2K related and other jobs with AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, and other firms-sees some problem. The retirees, she says, “like where they live. They have homes that they set aside so they could leave the rat race.”

It is not that senior programmers do not want to tackle the job, Payson says. “Thirty-seven per cent are interested in the money,” Payson claims (which can vary from $35 an hour for grunt-level coding to $150 an hour for top-level programming), “and 63 per cent are bored.” For the generation of technicians who came of age in the post-WW-II era, the 74-year-old Payson observes, there’s also an emotional eagerness to serve.

The taskfacing “solution provides” hired by the huge institutions to engage the services of older programmers, Payson says, is to find innovative ways to move mountains of code to Mohammed. One possible solution for linking the ailing mainframes to COBOL-gurus in retirement communities, Payson suggests, is the Net.

Don Heath, president of the Internet Society, thinks using the Net and the Web to coordinate Y2K problem-solving teams is a “great idea.” But Heath, who sits on the board of a company that builds problem-prevention tools for IBM database, also acknowledged that many of the older firms that will be slammed hardest by Y2K glitches-like banks – are the most sceptical of engaging the expertise of an offsite, online work pool. “They’re reluctant. For the larger data centres, it’s an issue of style, methodology, operating procedure,” Heath says. “It’s ill-founded, but it’s based on history and inertia.”

Steven Laine of System Partners – a solution provider with clients like Intel, Wells Fargo andCharles Schwab-agrees with Heath that the typical project manager “wants people who will be sitting there on site, where they can see them.” As the supply of up-to-speed legacy-language specialists are snatched up, however, Laine says, “the clients are going to have to be more flexible.”

Another group that has been looking at the Net as a way of enabling old programmers to get back on the job is educators. When the University of Santa Cruz Extension launched a course called “Year 2000 Orientation for Experienced Programmers” in September, the class filled up quickly, mostly with jobseekers in the over-50 age group. Now, says university marketing communications manager Joselyn Zimardi, UCSC is “looking for a way to take the course all over” – perhaps on the Web, or as a CD-ROM.

If companies can get used to relying on a Net-based pool of seasoned employees, industry acceptance of senior-age workers may even outlast the Y2K countdown.