Zed A. Shaw, Painter

4. Mandate that the whole system must use open source technology and not use any outside vendors unless that vendor is providing all their code open source. This is absolutely critical. The reason they're in this mess is because they use a closed dead system.

You ask, "But Zed, how will NJ pay for all of this?!" When NYC hired consulting firms they would get teams of 5 people billed at $400/hour/person. On that team only 1 person could actually code and the other 5 were pads to boost the budget. New York actually sued for this.

In addition to this, rather than just use simple technology, these 50 person consulting armies would be full of "software architects" who run out to buy the most complex things they can, usually from IBM and Oracle. Each of those then becomes a multi-million dollar project too.

When I worked there, I wiped out whole $million projects with cron and ftp. I'm really not joking. I literally fired up a cronjob that ran an ftp client to transfer data and wiped out a whole project. I did this to about 5 or 6 projects. That's how you pay for all this.

If you don't use outside consulting, don't use outside vendor software, use open source (which is what many vendors used anyway, and is usually better), a project like this could save possibly $10-20 million dollars. Give the employees a cut and they'll work their ass off.

In addition to this, the COVID-19 crisis has a ton of top notch startup programmers looking for something more stable. If NJ is still using COBOL then *that's* a stable job. NJ could snatch up some top people right now, but only if they incentivize the old workers first.

Like, if I were NJ, I'd have contacted every former WeWork programmer I could and offered them this gig. That alone could probably fill the required positions.

Final point: I firmly believe that projects like this don't work unless you have a person in charge who has the ability to hunt down bad actors and fire them. In my case, I had people hacking machines to kill of Ruby on Rails processes, and nobody fired them.

A main source of failure in many rewrite projects is the former programmers know that if their code is gone they can be fired, so they try to sabotage it. I've seen it over and over, and they're slick about it. Just little failures all over.

A big cash payout incentive that's collective will make their coworkers rat them out I guarantee. Nobody is going to let Neckbeard Joe sabotage the web server when it's going to cost them early retirement and $50k next month. The key though is to be ruthless in firing.

My experience was that after I had proof this one employee was logging on to a system and sabotaging my code the department did nothing to him. After that it was an endless barrage of saboteurs. I got super good at blocking them, but they should have been fired and jailed TBH.