California can't give state employees a pay cut, thanks to its ancient COBOL payroll system | Hacker News Reader

California can't give state employees a pay cut, thanks to its ancient COBOL payroll system

sacbee.com

16 pointstimr16 comments

Don't laugh. Some day folks will be struggling to maintain their ancient Rails junk and paying top dollar for anyone old enough to remember how it works.

Giant batch systems (I'm assuming this is a batch thing) in COBOL really aren't so insane anyway. The language is simple (if ugly, and an evolutionary dead end), the problem is comparatively simple, and the batch notion eliminates a lot of the complexities people deal with in modern "realtime" systems. The real problem here is the IT bureaucracy that allowed the system to get so stale that it wasn't maintainable anymore. But than can happen anywhere, with any technology.

My guess: actually it would take about five minutes.

But the only guy who knows that is an employee of the state of California, so what the hell is his incentive to let them know that? He's probably working right now to obfuscate the code.

No one has mentioned yet the possibility that the IT managers who claim it is impossible believe that it is unethical ever to cut the pay of a government worker (those tireless guardians of the public welfare).

In fact, today John Chiang (the controller in charge of these paychecks) is blaming COBOL, but in the past week Chiang has been saying he thought it was illegal, unethical, et cetera to enact these pay cuts. Not that Schwarzenegger's maneuvers are morally defensible, I really don't know, but it seems pretty unlikely that Chiang discovered this programming problem by coincidence the day after his other excuses failed to stop the executive order.

If I were in his position, I'd do the same thing. When he gets fired for not doing his job, he'll be a liberal hero for stalling the evil, tyrannical government of Schwarzenegger who was trying to suppress the lives and family's of California's most productive workers.

If Schwarzenegger could fire him, I'm sure he would. But, just like Arnie, he's been elected by the wise and wonderful electorate of this marvelous political entity.

Not sure if I would call government employees "California's most productive workers" ;-)

$177 million seems much too high for a replacement system. Of course 200K employees seems much too high for a state government as well.

California is awful big and has a ton of people in it. I'm not entirely convinced that California considers itself a country but just hasn't told anyone yet. They do everything different here and even check you at the state borders.

177 million does seem like a lot though.

> and even check you at the state borders.

What are you talking about? I live in California, have been in and out a great number of times, and have never encountered anything of the sort. Besides, it would be unconstitutional.

When I first came to California I was driving west on I-80 and I was stopped at the Nevada border. But they just asked if I had any plants or animals in the car and when I said no they left me alone. Apparently they are very concerned about invasive species. Hawaii is similar.

At night, there are border patrol stops coming into CA from AZ and within the state heading north to Los Angeles from San Diego.

Considering the complexity of the system, it doesn't seem like that much. Remember that staff at the UCal systems (7 schools now?) are all state employees. A single college would probably be paying in the tens of millions for a new payment system created from scratch at market rates.

I have a hard time believing they have no facility for changing pay. Seems like it would have been in version 0.1

I think the problem isn't that they can't change pay. It's that it's terribly difficult to change the pay for a hundred thousand workers (I'm assuming the CA gov. employs that many).

For instance, let's say that you calculate an employee's salary as: Position Salary * Location Variance + Yearly Boost * Number of Years Employeed. That seems simple. The program stores those variables and outputs a number for each worker. Now, if you tried to get everyone to $6.55/hr ($11,921 per year), you'd be in a pickle. You aren't storing wage or salary. So, there's no way to adjust someone's salary. Even if you consider variable wage/salary increases per year (vary by person and by year), you could still have a system that didn't give you a salary.

So, I can see how that would happen. What I can't understand is why they can't just get a list of employees and send that to their bank and say, give them all $458.50 every two weeks! So, I can buy that they can't alter their system - these types of things can be made in the most stupid ways. Why they can't just get a list of employees and cut them all equal checks doesn't compute.

Time to brush up on the "Learn Cobol in 24 Hours" books and move to Sacramento!

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