When the congress of the state of California approved the budget submitted by the economic team of the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, he threatened to pay state employees only the minimum wage ($ 6.55 hour), until the new budget is approved. The Comptroller of the State of California (John Chiang) was opposed at first by a matter of principle, but now claims a right “technique” for not implementing the order of Governor Schwarzenegger, according to his latest statements on the matter appeared in the Sacbee.com news portal, it would take weeks to make changes to the antiquated payroll system of the state of California is written in COBOL, and could carry 9 to 10 months back to its original state, Chiang claimed that the budget for updating the state payroll system is a project of $ 177 million dollars that has not yet been approved, and apparently neither will be in the state legislature.
Three specific comments, the first is why keep using a technology as old as COBOL is (if the maintenance is much more costly to change), second why the system was not updated when there was so much noise about the media’s bug 2000 (That was 8 years ago), and finally why not make outsourcing of payrolls in the state of California companies such as Paychex or ADP?.
Chiang claimed in their statements that they had to call for withdrawal of several former employees to work part time to give maintenance to the system of spreadsheets, but they were dismissed with the latest austerity measures proposed by Schwarzenegger. I personally believe that here we are talking about a typical case of fraud, and programs that are half bad and, for that is always calling the developers. And a lack of managerial discretion in Chiang because it is so easy and much cheaper to make the payroll outsourcing companies to set and process sheets million businesses in the U.S. today, why the rolls of the state of California must be processed internally, “when public employees because their salaries are subject to public scrutiny if some people think there is something shady.
And do not you feel so happy, because who knows maybe this future also awaits its “integrated system” which is written in Clipper / FoxPro or Visual Basic. When these things happen is that people just beginning to realize that there is something called software engineering.