John Glenn may not be too old to pilot a big bird into space, but he may have an easier time flying back to his old job than many of the old-school mainframe programmers being brought back into the fold to avert disasters caused by the year 2000 problem.
With demand exploding for programmers fluent in COBOL, Fortran, and other "legacy languages" to apply fixes to millions of lines of code, the job outlook for elder mainframe gurus eager to get their fingers back in the bits has never looked better. A study published last year by Hunter College computer-science professor Howard Rubin predicted that up to 700,000 code-cutters will have to be spliced back into the workforce in the next three years, and callow Web-geeks schooled in C++ and Java just don't have the right stuff.
The problem? Getting the workers to the work.
For an industry that has mushroomed by dangling dad-sized salaries before unmarried post-adolescents willing to move anywhere at the drop of an IPO, the Graying of High Tech presents 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, in downtown Chicago, yesterday. But these guys aren't going to live in a motel for six months. They're living on a golf course in South Florida or San Diego County, and they're very hard to pry loose. They moved there because they don't like Chicago - there are no drugs where they live, and no crime."
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 the same problem. The retirees, she says, "like where they live. They have homes that they set aside so they could leave the rat race."
It's not that senior programmers don't want to tackle the job, Payson says. "Thirty-seven percent are interested in the money," Payson claims (which can vary from US$35 an hour for grunt-level coding to $150 an hour for top-level programming), "and 63 percent are bored."
For the generation of technicians who came of age in the post-WWII era, the 74-year-old Payson - an ex-Marine - observes, there's also an emotional eagerness to serve: "They're turned on by a sense of patriotic duty. They want to save the country's ass."
The task facing "solution providers" 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 databases, also acknowledges that many of the older firms that will be slammed hardest by Y2K glitches - like banks - are the most skeptical of engaging the expertise of an off-site, online work pool.
"They're reluctant. For the larger data centers, it's an issue of style, methodology, operating procedure," Heath says. "It's ill-founded, but it's based on history as well as inertia."
Steven Laine of Systems Partners - a solution provider with clients like Intel, Wells Fargo, and Charles 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 older 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 nationwide" - 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.
"The Amexes and the Visas are still going after the youth," says Frances Nevarez. "But we're talking about replacements that can cost thousands of dollars per line of code. Any small business in their right mind would take experience over education."
The elder programmers, however, may have to learn to be flexible too, she says. "Instead of living on the golf course and enjoying life, as we'd like them to, they're going to have to meet their employers halfway."
