Grace Hopper's Revenge

"One day, my pretties, we will destroy them all!" *

File under: California Governor stymied by hilariously perfect metaphor for everything that's wrong with this country.

From Yahoo News:

Old technology foils Schwarzenegger's wage order

...
For the second time in two years, Schwarzenegger has ordered most state workers' pay cut to the federal minimum wage because lawmakers missed their deadline to fix the state's $19 billion budget deficit. The Legislature's failure to act has left the state without a spending plan as the new fiscal year begins.

Chiang cited Friday's ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeals, which said "unfeasibility" would excuse him from complying with Schwarzenegger's minimum wage order. He said a fix to the state's computerized payroll system won't be ready until October 2012.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 state workers remain in limbo about the size of their July paychecks while Chiang asks the court for guidance on how to proceed. If wages are indeed cut to $7.25 an hour, employees will be reimbursed once a budget is signed.

John Harrigan, who served as a division chief for the state's payroll services from 1980 to 2006, said upgrading the system would be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. He said it could be done, but not without violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and substantially altering the payroll process.

"It's not something that you can take lightly and do overnight," said Harrigan, who also served as chief deputy controller from 2000 to 2002. "You have all the collective bargaining for civil servants and (state universities) that have to be taken into consideration. ... It's very complicated. It would take considerable effort."

The state's payroll system was designed more than 60 years ago and was last revamped in 1970, Hallye Jordan, state controller's office spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

A report by the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office said an overhaul of the state's computerized payroll system was proposed by the controller's office in 2004. A year later, the Legislature approved $130 million for the effort, called the 21st Century Project.

Work to complete the project has been postponed by the controller's office repeatedly over the past several years, said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the governor's Department of Personnel Administration.

"They had various setbacks that only they can explain," she said.

Harrigan said he was involved with the 21st Century Project when it was conceived in the late 1990s. He said the state fired the vendor executing the project in 2008 because the company went bankrupt.

As the project dragged on, the state has had fewer experts on hand who could thoroughly understand the programming languages used to design the system.

"There's been a knowledge loss with people retiring," Harrigan said.
...

If this story of the Guvinator barking out empty orders about "zee bayroll zizdem being vixed now! Now! Now! And zo fort" leaves you dizzy with deja vu

no, you are not suffering from Anterograde Treknesia.

These latest impotent dicta from chief executive officer of The Sunshine State is virtually identical to this story featuring the same government, the same Governor and the same State Controller...


From the LA Times, December 2008:

Schwarzenegger orders mass layoffs, unpaid furloughs

Union leaders for state employees vow to challenge the legality of the mandatory time off, which amounts to about a 9% pay cut according to the governor's finance department.

By Patrick McGreevy and Jordan Rau
December 20, 2008

Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday ordered mass layoffs and unpaid furloughs for state workers starting in February to address California's growing fiscal crisis.

Under his executive order, 238,000 employees will be forced to take off two unpaid days per month through June 30, 2010. Managers will receive either the furlough or an equivalent salary reduction during the same period.


H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Schwarzenegger's finance department, said the mandatory time off is the equivalent of about a 9% pay cut for affected workers. He said the furloughs would save the state more than $1.2 billion.

...
Schwarzenegger attempted a few months ago to unilaterally reduce the pay of state employees, but his order never took effect. State Controller John Chiang said the state's payroll system was incapable of carrying it out.
...

...engaged in the same call-and-response over the same, balky payroll system from two years ago.

From IT News, August 2008:

Schwarzenegger pay plans thwarted by COBOL

By Iain Thomson
7 August 2008 07:39AM

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to reduce all state employees pay to the minimum wage are being blocked because the payroll system is run on COBOL.

Schwarzenegger signed an executive order last week to cut the salary of the state’s 200,000 employees to the minimum wage until the state budget, currently 36 days behind schedule, is passed.

But State Controller John Chiang told the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization that this was impossible as the payroll system was written 30 years ago in COBOL and there weren’t enough programmers to do the job.

Chiang estimated that with current resources it would take six months to make the change, and then nine to ten months to reverse them.

"Pragmatically, we just can't get the system to work in a timely manner for us to implement payment of minimum wage," Chiang said, according to the Sacramento Bee.

...

Of course, no one with any grasp of the history of technology -- its dark secrets and strange mutations -- has any trouble believing that tech-muggles like Governor Schwarzenegger and 90% of the rest of the United States would think that fixing technical problems is as simple as yelling at them. After all, in the world most people see around them, Man has not only gone to the Moon, but has stopped because it was boring and expensive.

Worse than the Whites Sands Missile Range Water Park even!

In three minutes the average 14-year-old can download 12 million songs into their iPhone that all sound like "Creed", while simultaneously playing "Gray Lensmen versus Gangsta Che Guevara" and tracking the GPS coordinates of every Zhu Zhu Pet in the Zhuniverse. And so, given all of that and a quarter century of ads like this

the world most people see and accept is one where Technology appears to be both Ubiquitous (true) and Magic (false). (But a strange and special, Populist brand of Magic, that is at once opaque and complex...but also believed to be so simple that any chimp could learn everything they need to know in a few hours if only they really wanted to.)

So since technology is Easy and Magic, it must necessarily follow that fixing technology's flaws and failures are a matter of motivation: If the right people are yelled at or flattered or threatened, the problem will be solved and, conversely, if the problem has not yet been solved then clearly someone, somewhere is Not Yelling Loud Enough.

Of course, technology -- especially old tech -- does not work that way at all.

Old tech doesn't work like an iPad or a Roomba; instead, it works exactly like infrastructure (pictured here are a few of the runes and a grimoire I used when I was a minor sorcerer during the Last Days of COBOL...

...and which I held onto for sentimental reasons.)

Of course, there really were never any Last Days of COBOL, which is why there are so many ancient systems still humming away in the bellies of so many banks, insurance companies and governments.

Because they still work.

For the most part.

You see, in the years between the Kennedy and Carter Administrations when many of those old systems were being built, the programmers who worked on them had no idea they would last so long.

Like the builders of roads or bridges or dams, the people who laid the digital floorboards of these old systems were creating the stable foundation on which future enterprises would depend, and from which future prosperity would flow. Like the builders of roads or bridges or dams, the work they did cost a fortune. And like the builders of roads or bridges or dams, they assumed that that however tight their technique or advanced their building materials, one day what they were creating would come to the end of its useful life and need to be replaced.

But in many cases, that last part never happened.

The organizations that came to depend on those ancient applications also came to take them for granted. I mean, why replace a perfectly good billing system just because some squirrely guys who work down in the lightless caverns of the IT department keep insisting that the world will end if we don't? Slap an HTML shell over it and a VPN around it and -- boom! -- something almost as awesome as a brand, new system at a fraction of the cost!

Guess who gets the raise and promotion in this equation? And in a culture where being careful is scoffed at and cutting corners is rewarded, guess how long it takes for people to figure out that there is no future in being prudent and thoughtful about the future?

Then came the outsourcing/downsizing craze of the 80s and 90s, and suddenly those dour, squirrely, expensive, IT guys were no longer a problem because they had been laid off; replaced by a skeleton maintenance crew based in India...and a lot of smiley people in expensive suits who used the word "synergy" a lot.

And so, like the roads and bridges and dams of the Eisenhower and Johnson and Roosevelt administrations that were supposed to be budgeted for, planned for and replaced as part of thoughtful, long-range planners but never were and are now rotting out from underneath us...

...many of the Big Iron software systems from an age gone by ended up in the hands of short-term, immediate-profit-driven consultant-types who saw no reason why they shouldn't patch and paint just enough life out of those systems to last until they skipped out for the next gig...

...leaving behind systems buried way down deep in the heart of the organization that no one knows how to fix anymore, and which continues to groan ever louder and shudder ever harder under the weight of what continues to be stacked on top of them.

Until this happens:


Of course, any and all of this could be fixed.

All it requires is money: the political will to collect it and the discipline to spend it on what matters.

Which will never happen.

Sure it would put millions of people back to work and rebuild the foundation on which our future success and prosperity depends, but spending billions on rebuilding infrastructure is now called Socialism, and spending money on Socialism makes All Real Americans mad.

As opposed to pissing trillions away into endless wars half a world a away, which makes All Real Americans happy.

And even though they are completely toxic to and antithetical in every way to the kind of prudent, long-range planning that is the only thing that can possibly save us, somehow eventually unfettered Free Markets will fix all of the many, catastrophic problems that are now bearing down on us!

Because Freedom isn't Free, you lazy fucking hippies!

Or something.

*(For the record, the inventor of COBOL -- navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper [December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992] -- was, by all accounts, a perfectly nice, brilliant nerd, the likes of whom we could sure use more of these days)