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INDUSTRY WATCH:
The End-of-Summertime Blues
By David Rubinstein
September 1, 2004 — They say you’re supposed to use a sabbatical from work as a time for self-improvement. Some people take classes, or learn a new language, or discover how to catch fish with a spear. I can say that in the spirit of the time I was given to spend away from this office, I was able to better myself in at least one way. Over the past weeks, I got a better tan.
Despite repeated trips to the beach and town pool, though, I could not completely remove myself from what’s happening in the industry, and in the world as a whole.
My first day at the pool, I ran into a neighbor who heads up a Manhattan financial institution’s software development department. We asked each other what we were doing there on a Tuesday afternoon, when we normally would have been at work. I explained I was on sabbatical, clearing my head of technology issues and recharging my batteries. He told me he was off because he had to begin to burn the mountain of vacation days he’d accumulated because there was just no time to take off.
He’s leading up efforts to upgrade from Sybase 11 to 12.5 and to gain Sarbanes-Oxley and SAS70 certification. He has a team of nine good developers, he said, but lamented that the systems his company runs were developed by long-gone programmers, who wrote little documentation, so his team spends a huge amount of time playing catch-up.
Making decisions to change to something his team doesn’t fully understand is difficult at best, and he’s left choosing between refactoring an application, or making a quick fix that could further bastardize an already fragmented system. He said his priority now is to move the knowledge out of people’s heads so that if, heaven forbid, one of his key developers gets hit by a bus, the company isn’t left with a system that can’t be supported.
It was at that point, tiring of tech talk, that I excused myself, walked over to the snack bar and purchased a Good Humor Toasted Almond bar, which I savored in the shade of a large piece of corrugated plastic hanging over a small area of the roasting cement park.
Later that week, I went to the beach, and after a few minutes in the sun, grew quite parched. I walked over to the snack bar (notice a leitmotif here?) to get a cold beer, when I noticed another neighbor standing at the tap behind the counter, filling cups with the frothy brew. As I know him to be a programmer, not a bartender, I asked him what he was doing there on a Thursday afternoon. “I’m on leave for the summer, so I’m working here until school starts again.” I wondered why it would matter when school started, and he explained that he was no longer programming, but had taken a job teaching in a New York City public school.
“I was outsourced and downsized,” he told me, explaining that his company could find less expensive people to do the kind of programming he had been doing. Ah, the benefits of outsourcing really come home to roost, I thought. Another corporate board adds millions to its bottom line, and lines the pockets of its top executives for brilliantly figuring out how to cut costs and raise profits, while my neighbor—and plenty like him—takes a 30 percent pay cut to go from computer programming to teaching math to a bunch of junior-high kids for whom none of the lessons of corporate governance or the labor movement add up. And he’s one of the lucky ones, I thought. How many programmers are out of work altogether?
I paid for my beer, went back to my chaise lounge, and began to read the paper. America was under an orange terror alert. Officials believe that a greater threat from terrorists could come in the form of a computer worm or virus, rather than nuclear or biological weapons. These worms, the article said, could cripple our financial markets, leading to a panic not seen since 1929.
That one really unnerved me. Heck, right now, we have so much spyware and virus activity that most computer users have multiple instances of these agents on their PCs and aren’t even aware of it. And the major companies—Microsoft, primarily, as it dominates the operating system and browser markets—seem helpless to stop this. All that spending money to fix these problems does is cut into the bottom-line profits. Nothing to gain there.
But what will happen when something even more malicious comes down the pike? Will the government launch a unilateral cyberwar, running roughshod over the rights of global Internet users? The administration could try to justify it by claiming there are weapons of mass destruction in cyberspace—only this time there actually might be proof.
Then I thought that the next time my sabbatical rolls around, in another five years or so, I’ll just skip it. All this time away from the world of high technology is just too depressing.
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times.
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