re: Fired IT employees sue LSU

quote:

---

Ballinger, Flanagin and Helm – Bankston’s clients – would have refused the LSU job offer had they known about the Louisiana law, which required all the vehicles they own to be registered in this state, he said. That would include the vehicles their families continued to use at their homes in Illinois.

---

I totally think we should fire people based on the piece of paper in their glove box and the taxes on their Tahoe.

Why don’t they have a bunch of electrical engineering, computer science, etc. majors work on all this shite for credit hours under the supervision of a paid specialist and knock the shite out?

One- COBOL isn’t the preferred language of most businesses but a lot of legacy servers still use it.

At least one of Louisiana’s state agencies in particular did use it up until the 2000s, when they did a costly upgrade from their homegrown mainframe software package to a Customizable Off The Shelf system which required a costly set of contracts to implement and additional service contracts for the maintenance of the core code components in addition to any development done by their in-house programmers.

Two - Universities having antiquated mainframe setups which handle their systems isn’t really out of the ordinary. Part of the reason many of these systems limp on is that any conversion to a new platform, such as in my first example, tends to be a multi-year clusterfrick because half of what you want is on the old system and half is on the new.

While I was in college, some of my IS professors were telling us anecdotal stories about other colleges getting sued because they started a conversion which took so long and got so fricked up they couldn’t accurately tell people if they had enough credits to graduate.

Three - Did these IT professionals telecommute from across the country but maintain residences in Illinois? Well, they were in violation of Louisiana law passed by Sloth while he was in the Legislature as an attempt to frick with Jindal’s hires.

This being a reprisal over people not wanting to dump a legacy system doesn’t change that people got you fired for not following the law.

The problem isn’t the hardware at this point, it’s that the software won’t run on something else and that the data is a goddamn nightmare to convert to another system.

Try converting 40 years of data where the programs are written in COBOL and see how long it takes you and how much it costs.

COBOL is a rare skill set and you either have to train people to use it or have to overpay people who have it. A position based language like that is a far different animal from other common languages which tend to be either procedural or object oriented.

So it's a funding issue and not a technical issue.

It’s a logistical issue, in that the data is such a problem to deal with that it takes an inordinate amount of time and money to pull off.

As I alluded to earlier, a number of schools who hired these consulting outfits to convert their data ended up getting their asses sued off because the transition between the systems was utterly and thoroughly fricked to the point where they couldn’t generate transcripts to show someone has enough credits to graduate.


It’s one of these processes where you have to know exactly what you are doing and have a very good plan to transition stuff off the old server because going half-in half-out doesn’t work well.

quote:

---

So it's a funding issue and not a technical issue.

---

Sure, even 40 years of data can be converted. I just finished an EMR conversion that had 20 years of data.

i graduated with a CIS/Management degree in 2008.
In 2006 was the last year they offered a COBOL class.
We were told, "you are almost guaranteed at least a entry level job at WalMart HQ and a lot of Universities if you pass this class"

and teke is right. with these old dinosaur mainframes: it isn't speed or processing power that keeps them from being shutdown and sold off for scrap metal; it's data conversion. there's no one to do it or would want to spend the time doing it.

quote:

---

and teke is right. with these old dinosaur mainframes: it isn't speed or processing power that keeps them from being shutdown and sold off for scrap metal; it's data conversion. there's no one to do it or would want to spend the time doing it.

---

According to our cobol developers, there isn't any other language that processes massive data loads as efficient as COBOL. We run over 7 million transactions a month through a COBOL based language through Linux and it is efficient, quick and accurate. We write the output to copybooks, and those copybooks are picked up by C# and SQL programs and used in more modern coded systems. I can't imagine banks and financial institutions keeping this language around when there is a more efficient language to be used even if the cost runs in the millions.

As several have mentioned before, it sounds like the hardware is the problem moreso than the code.