[meow1032]

As someone who works with a lot of state IT people, if they don't know how to hire programmers, they probably don't know how to manage programmers. In a bureaucracy, if the administrators are making these kinds of unrealistic hiring demands in a crisis, it probably means that the administrators outrank all programmers and don't trust them to make their own decisions. This is not an environment to work in.

[neaanopri]

This is a crisis, not a normal time. Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

[BiteCode_dev]

Problem is, that's how they get away with everything.

They fix nothing, then wait for somebody to need them enough, or have compassion enough to handle their mess.

Basically here, they are saying: we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back. We didn't think technical debt was a thing. It has always worked. And it's virtual. And IT is always exaggerating anyway.

Now it does bite them back, and do they take responsibility ?

No. They ask for competent people to have mercy and save the day because the situation is dire. Because this is special this time, unlike the other times.

This is completely not like with the health care system that never got fixed and now the medical personal is paying for it so that the people don't suffer as much from this mismanagement.

They will not pay more. They will no fix anything. They will not respect you more, change the way things are done, or take any responsibility for this. And in fact they will probably guilt trip you into give up your health to overwork on this with less resources and for less pay because it's an emergency.

A friend of mine works in an hospital right now. She has been at work for 15 days straight. They already told her she won't get paid for the days she was not supposed to work but did.

Then as a final fuck you, if this turns out ok, if the catastrophe is avoided, they will get the reward.

The nurses or the programmers ? They will be forgotten in a week. Nothing will change.

But for the mismanagers, their superior will thank them for managing this situation well. They may even get promoted and have more responsibility.

So you have the choice between saving the money of poor people now and reinforcing the suck of the whole system, of letting people suffer for a chance of a redo and purging the ones that lead to this.

This is a terrible choice to have to make.

Especially since we have the empathy to make us discuss this, while clearly they don't.

[TAForObvReasons]

This is honestly a terrible take. NJ did try to modernize the benefits system in 2007, awarding the contract to a company that is now owned by HP. News article: https://www.nj.com/politics/2014/11/nj_ends_118_million_cont...

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes. Parent asserted:

> we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back.

And the historical record showed that NJ made that realization at least before 2007 (which is when the contract was awarded)

[pas]

No, it's not. These state IT systems and this habit that leads to their inevitable downfall needs to die.

They respect nothing. Scope? No, we need to fulfill every need and some. Budget? No, of course we don't have cash, and we have to be very careful, it's the taxpayers' money! Time? It's already late! (Yet they weren't able to get it done in 10+ years.)

They have no real competency, they don't even have competency to delegate this to someone competent. And they lack the competency to manage their own inconsistency regarding these issues.

The linked tweet thread is a perfect example of this. (Rampant project mismanagement; too big to fail; they introduced some Hadoop scoring system to match inconsistent records and whatnot instead of simply throwing out all the bad data and handing the rest separately - eg hiring a bunch of unemployed people to go over them.)

A state that should be at the top of any kind of project management and procurement hierarchies wasn't able to supervise an IT system project. It's so incompetent just thinking about it will lead to spontaneous combustion.

[Cobol78]

Yup. Exactly right. And they think the 26 year old outside consultant knows how to fix the problem better than the 50 year old government programmer, who management has spent 17 years beating down their self respect.

[_v7gu]

Consistently assigning work to big firms who consistently screw up... All they want to do is show that "they're trying", and the charade will continue until someone does get fired for buying IBN.

[lotsofpulp]

I bet NJ wouldn’t accept any excuses from a small business that tried to claim “they’re trying” if they had technical issues with payroll.

[v8engine]

https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440

[robk]

Surely outsourced and offshored isn't something to praise them for

[Cobol78]

Like off-shored protective medical gear, off-shored pharmaceuticals manufacturing, and now a country full of unskilled 20 somethings that can only do phone apps and coffee baristas.

Companies will not like it, consumers will not like it, State budgets will not like it,

But like cobol programmers, we need to learn how to make things and build our own supply chain.

My old employer did not listen last year when I retired. Nobody was assigned to make an annual change to a REXX program. I learned it on my own because it predated me. But the process was so rigorous because we had to be our own RACF Admin to make our own RACF I’d to get to the datasets to change, then run the programs, but they got rid of printers connected to the mainframe and tighter up FTP so much that if took days to refresh passwords and ftp print files to your pc hard drive. Then run programs in C# that scalped off the first column and read the mainframe page skips....

Am I was suppose to teach this to a C# programmer who would not need to run this for 6 more months. I blame management. They loved outside consultants and treated our own programmers like loading dock employees, write ups when 5 minutes late for work.

They wanted me to take a brand new high end pc with me when I retired. I left it on my desk when I left. They had 6 months to learn it.

[scarface74]

Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

[coribuci]

> Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

Because the only thing they are specialized in is sucking tax money from the government.

> It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

That's their only pedigree. In other countries they also took a lot of money and delivered crap. So people should be aware by now. But with all this corr^W lobby ...

[KhoomeiK]

Getting Atlas Shrugged vibes. Lots of parallels with this situation actually.

[cvhashim]

Seems like OP is describing the plight of the average worker who gets left to clean up the mess with no credit at the end of it all and less of the business leaders or executives.

[mindslight]

IIRC, the capable workers were the first gone to Galt's Gulch. The story dwells on slightly-less-bad business people running around like decapitated chickens trying to keep things working, but the real heroes just quietly noped out.

[BoiledCabbage]

> So you have the choice between saving the money of poor people now and reinforcing the suck of the whole system, of letting people suffer for a chance of a redo and purging the ones that lead to this.

What a terribly wrong take. If you really believe the system is that corrupted, and that horrible then you know darn well that the count of people who suffered during this emergency won't make a difference. There will be "accountability" in some form, but it won't be driven by how many people did or didn't get money for food at all.

Whether you help them or not won't change the system. So instead you're saying scores of families should go hungry so you can stay on your high horse and lecture.

[orestarod]

That's a good reason. You don't need a moral reason to not choose a paid job. The reason scores of families will go hungry because of the mismanagement, not because one human did not step up to keep the mess rolling. In analogy, the reason Africa is starving is because of the past and present extreme exploitation from foreign powers, and said foreign powers sponsored corruption and violence. Not because "a heartless middle class salary man did not send his monthly 10 dollars", turning a blind eye to the real causes of the situation.

[Cobol78]

The big corporations, will get $18,000 from every taxpayer from their future tax dollar.

But they struggle just to give each worker in this country $1200.

It is hush money. Then next year they will tell us it is taxable income. Watch.

[raverbashing]

Yes, don't forget there will also be some deniers calling it a fraud afterwards: https://twitter.com/TheKouk/status/1211123181051768832

[eru]

> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

In absolute terms, perhaps. But if you are moving away from taking jobs out of self interest, and into doing something for the public good; you might as well check out https://80000hours.org/ and pick the job that has the most positive impact.

My guess is that working any kind of 'normal' programmer job and giving 10% of your income to an effective charity would beat out enduring the bad boss in New Jersey.

[scarface74]

10% of my salary wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as helping millions of people get unemployment checks quickly.

[eru]

You'd have to look at the marginal impacts.

You working for them would most likely not push them from failure to success. It would perhaps make success marginally more likely, or perhaps decrease schedule overruns slightly. Or perhaps make not much of a difference at all, depending on how screwed they are.

Of course, the estimate of impact also depends on how you value humans. If you value all humans fairly equally, then Americans who had a job until fairly recently (ie those eligible for unemployment insurance) are already fairly well off compared to the people who benefit from more malaria nets. Especially since their unemployment benefits would merely be delayed, not lost.

Lots of people value those closer to them higher. The most prominent example are family and friends. But valuing compatriots higher is fairly common as well.

Of course, you can give more than 10% of your income as well.

[Cobol78]

Would do it myself. For free because of the unemployed. But I see no link to who is hiring, not going thru a head hunter who takes a rake, and states cannot send you a firewall link and password without a month or more of red tape. And rightly so if it is a payroll system, the opening it would make for abuse.

[coribuci]

Then why don't _you_ do it ?

[scarface74]

I didn’t say I would do either. It is a generic discussion about tradeoffs.

[renewiltord]

Did you apply? I think it would be interesting to hear the story of what it looks like inside if you decide to work with them.

[IanS00]

There's a difference between a generic "bad boss" and an incompetent one. An incompetent one will kill the project.

If NJ have failed to maintain legacy systems that good COBOL development needs, almost by definition they have incompetent management (and a Governor who can't even pronounce COBOL). They likely don't have the dev or test boxes that they should have. They will either put up barriers to the other systems the developer needs to understand, or will throw open the doors so that my fixes get broken by everyone else's fixes.

[matheusmoreira]

> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing.

Let them get nothing. Then they'll call for the heads of the governors, the very people who couldn't care less about the system until it stopped working. They are the ones who could have made a difference but actively chose not to because it just wasn't that important to them.

[krageon]

> That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

A bad boss will absolutely give you burnout, and that lasts for years. You are of course correct, but at the same time I would never ask this of someone and I wouldn't subject myself to it either. Bad bosses will destroy your quality of life in the medium-long term.

[DeusExMachina]

This would work if we had only one problem to solve. Real people getting unemployment checks is an important problem for sure, but not the only one.

It's better to direct our limited resources to better porjects with a higher success rate and/or impact.

[tomohawk]

No. It is worth holding the bad boss accountable and firing the bad boss who put them in this situation in the first place.

[0x8BADF00D]

They'll change their tune when they won't be able to find anyone. The free market is as honest as it gets. If you underpay and undertreat your employees, they will seek an alternative. It is simple opportunity cost.

[eru]

It will probably not be all or nothing.

They'll probably find a few people who will give it a go. The result will probably be delays and failure. Business as usual.

[d3ad1ysp0rk]

I would normally agree, but emergencies can create opportunities for improvements in the process. See healthcare.gov for example.

[Frost1x]

"Chaos is a ladder" though it didn't turn out so well for that fictional character, his assessment wasn't wrong.