STL Time Machine Report #27 - Wednesday 19 August 1998 (1998-08-19) A few yards from my cube there is a 4-color plotter-printed chart posted on a wall. It's our Y2K project schedule, covering 1998 thru rollover. It shows the remediation schedule and testing schedule for mission critical applications. I noticed a couple of newbies walk up to it and start pointing at it. Since I was walking by I struck up a conversation with them. It turns out they're two mainframe contract programmers recently brought on board. They were trying to understand the chart, which is pretty complicated, so I explained it to them. Since I'm a ten-year employee, I don't get out much. So I talked to them about contracting. One of them recently worked for the local natural gas utility, Laclede Gas Company. He worked on Y2K for them. They did some date expansion and some date windowing. They set up their time machine, and the testing went so well they let all their contract programmers go a week after Time Machine testing started. The other programmer had done Y2K work for two local companies, a prominent brokerage house, and the local electric Utility, AmerenUE. The brokerage house has a time machine, but I didn't nail him down on whether the electric utility had a time machine. Both these guys are mainframe programmers, so they couldn't tell me what the local utilities were doing about embedded systems. Later, I mentioned this to my boss, and she said that a lot of contractors she's interviewed are listing recent Y2K programming experience in the St. Louis area. These two contract programmers agreed that contractor rates have been going up, but not by huge leaps and bounds (Sorry, Cory, we all wish we were gazillionaires!). And there is a local shortage of programmers even with the recent closing of Venture stores, which should have freed up a couple of hundred geeks for other jobs. A while ago I posted a URL to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Mercantile bank, which started up their Time Machine last July 1st. Eric Buckley worked on a Time Machine for a different St. Louis brokerage house way back in late 1997. By my rough count, that's five or six large St. Louis corporations that are doing Time Machine testing, or have significant Y2K projects underway. As of 1998-08-19, My countdown now reads: 135 days until 1999-01-01 (Everybody should start testing) 500 days until 2000-01-01 (Rollover) STANDARD DISCLAIMER: I am NOT an official corporate spokesperson, and my opinions should not be held against my benevolent employer. -- Arnold Trembley http://home.att.net/~arnold.trembley/ "Y2K? Because Centuries Happen!"