Prediction: New Jersey won't be able to hire COBOL programmers because the reason they still have COBOL in the first place is because a union controls who works on that system and mandates zero changes in order to keep jobs. The union will prevent the hiring.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I firmly believe that if management had immediately fired and started a police investigation of that one employee the sabotage practice would have ended immediately. Without an ability to fire saboteurs and griefers you'll never get anywhere in a rewrite.
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End of conversation
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