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A good friend of mine was (and still is) a civil/construction engineer. Other than some introduction courses in college, he had never done any programming befor
by TomVDB 7y ago
A good friend of mine was (and still is) a civil/construction engineer. Other than some introduction courses in college, he had never done any programming before. But after losing his job in 1998, he was hired by a major European consulting company to work on the Y2K problem.
With an auditorium full of others who had barely any programming experience, he was given a crash course in Cobol for a month, and then he had to go through thousands of lines of code of bank software that ran on some mainframe and identify all cases where a date was hard-coded as 2 characters.
Extremely tedious work, but there were tons of fixes to be made.
The problem was real, and the billions that were spent on fixing things were necessary.
- codeisawesome 7y agoI’m wondering what happened to the people in meeting rooms who suggested that this could be automated if it needed no deep understanding of the COBOL language or the banking domain..? EDIT (for clarity): that’s what I would say, and I’m pretty sure many people smarter than I had said it - so I’m just curious what objections made business push forward with the “relatively unskilled” human labour intensive practices instead, because that’s the history we have now.
- setpatchaddress 7y agoI'm not a COBOL expert, but I suspect you misunderstand both the difficulty of teaching a machine to understand the problem well enough to automate fixes for it and the available computing resources at the time. This was still the era of Windows 95, the classic Mac, and expensive workstations.
- Smoosh 7y agoThere were tools available, but it was increasing the risk (in a risk-averse atmosphere) to trust them to catch all cases. Try explaining to your superiors why you were given the task of fixing the issue and instead of completely fixing it you saved some money. Probably unacceptable. Also, much of the remediation could not be automated anyway (for example you may not be able to assume the century is '19' for a given date field which can be in the future. You may need to do a comparison to a cutoff date, or you may only have to enlarge the field knowing that the value is supplied from elsewhere which will itself get fixed), so it fell back to people looking at the code, understanding it just enough, making the required changes, and planning/executing the testing.