Comment on Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported
afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 1 year agoI get it. Most days I would love to get out of tech. Any given project I got half a dozen sales people and PEs who want to trash my software/electrical designs. It is commonplace for me to downgrade my work. Giving customers a less reliable more expensive system. Given how much of my work is for the government there is zero mystery where cost disease is coming from.
I just worry that if I walk away no one will stop them.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
One of the jobs I worked, there was an older programmer, who had been their since the company was created, or very soon afterward. He survived Vietnam, learned COBOL via the GI Bill at a college, programmed the system underlying the /entire/ financial data system(s) of the company, from paying employees to receiving vendor payments to intracomapany finances… everything.
Before I left that job, we would talk often. He told me that his whole career, not a single VP or manager /ever/ listened to his constructive criticism or concerns about requests to make the system do something that would cause a problem later on down the line, that would be incompatible with other systems his stuff integrated with, either internal or external to the company, or often just asks to design totally useless features or even design things according to a manager of VPs specs, even though he explained to them that their design was fundamentally flawed from a programming perspective and not actually ever be able to work at even a test use case at all, because the higher ups think they know how to write code, but actually do not.
He explained to me that he had been telling them for 3 years he was going to retire, and that they needed to find a replacement programmer who knows COBOL, as the way the company’s systems have culture have evolved will mean that his code his systems, will /need/ constant updates and tweaks to keep utter chaos from ensuing in his absence.
He then further explained to me that he knew they would not do this because of ignorance and arrogance… and that within a year of him departing he expected to be billing them 3x his current hourly rate as a contractor.
Management seema to have assumed they could hire someone like me, a young relatively novice programmer at the time, to replace him for 1/3 or a 1/4 of his current wages.
They did not understand that COBOL is a dead programming language that hasnt been taught in Computer Science courses at basically any American University since, at best, the early 90s… and that anyone who actually knows COBOL would by definition be a very senior programmer, and literally laugh at the pitiful wage they were offering to non existent ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’.
And so, he left, within 3 months other systems in the company evolved until they broke the underlying COBOL system. Cue 3 months of ‘make everything reliant on the COBOL code work witbout touching rhe COBOL code’ for me, which is of course impossible because the parts of it some of my reports drew from were now outputting either nothing, or an error code.
I leave because the stress is too much, and within another 3 months, he is being contracted to fix the mess he told them would happen if theh did not do what he suggested.