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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

snellman.net

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#111

Post by warfangle »

russell wrote: post #37

As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the furor when Gingrich and Clinton discovered that the FAA was using vacuum tube computers and radar in the air traffic control system. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/clinton.htm The foreign (sole) vacuum tube supplier that Clinton mentioned was Russia. Oh, the embarrassment! I knew that there were some delays in rolling out the the replacement system, so I did so…

A similarly embarrassing state of affairs is the train traffic control system used by the NYC subway system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjx3S3UjmnA

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#112

Post by XorNot »

emidln wrote: post #27
nasalgoat wrote: post #5

Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.

I remember upgrading a bunch of this stuff in the mid to late 00s. Likely nothing that I upgraded to then modern standards using Python 2.6 and PHP 5.x has seen an update. At the time, it was actually hard to upgrade to PHP 5 or anything other than PHP 4 or Perl 5 because so many sites were using shared hosting that only support PHP4/Perl5 + MySQL.

There's a couple hundred PHP 4.4 sites running on our shared hosting. We're probably never going to upgrade them.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#113

Post by artmageddon »

logfromblammo wrote: post #87
breischl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, you are not joking. I still get the occasional ping from someone looking for me to work on TIBCO. I did a tiny bit of work on that in ~2001. It was on my resume for about a year. I'm still getting pinged for it 13 years later. Ironically (or perhaps predictably) I've avoided adding the same two technologies you mentioned to my own resume.

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list. I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that…

It seems like everyone wants resumes in Word format. The one time I tried to send a PDF the recruiter nearly treated it like it was some unknown format and asked me to resend as Word.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#114

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hinkley wrote: post #75

Jesus, man. Company X? Company Y? Product Z? Variable naming is a very important skill.

On legacy systems you may only have six significant characters for identifiers. Gotta scrounge for every last character.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#115

Post by danielweber »

crystalmeph wrote: post #96
mey wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was in the US, you should seek back wages through your state.

I got another job quickly, and it didn't hurt me too much financially (I was still living at home with my parents at the time). But you're right, I should have, if only to force them them out of business and out of the next guy's misery.

It still may not be too late. Plus other employees who were screwed but unaware of their rights may automatically get checks.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#116

Post by mml »

nasalgoat wrote: post #5

Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.

Did some work for a mammary related business many years ago.

A periodic job was to go through "Lois'" inbox, and clean it out. It seems their payment frontend simply generated an email for the backend payment processor (Lois). Presumably, she manually keyed the cc info into a physical xon terminal to process payments. There were usually 10s of thousands of messages consisting only of credit card info sitting in the clear for months at a stretch.

It was FreeBSD though, so they were cool in my book :)

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#117

Post by me2i81 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #114
hinkley wrote: post #75

Jesus, man. Company X? Company Y? Product Z? Variable naming is a very important skill.

On legacy systems you may only have six significant characters for identifiers. Gotta scrounge for every last character.

Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#118

Post by twic »

TrevorJj wrote: post #98
russell wrote: post #37

As soon as I saw the title, I thought of the furor when Gingrich and Clinton discovered that the FAA was using vacuum tube computers and radar in the air traffic control system. http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/clinton.htm The foreign (sole) vacuum tube supplier that Clinton mentioned was Russia. Oh, the embarrassment! I knew that there were some delays in rolling out the the replacement system, so I did so…

I was in the control tower of an international airport as recently as 4 years ago, and can confirm that at least some of the systems were still built on 1960's technology - the radar scopes were basically pre-CRT technology. On the other hand, for something as fault-intolerant as air traffic control there's a huge amount of value in reliable, well understood systems.

Pre-CRT? You mean like John Logie-Baird type stuff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#119

Post by vonmoltke »

Kalium wrote: post #17
mring33621 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear %prospect_name%; I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you. Sincerely, %recruiter_sig%

You're going to give me nightmares. I still get emails like this from a six-year-old version of my resume.

I still get occasional emails like this about a ten-year-old, straight EE version of my resume. Someone out there really wants to hire me as a facilities engineer. :P

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#120

Post by vacri »

danielweber wrote: post #115
crystalmeph wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got another job quickly, and it didn't hurt me too much financially (I was still living at home with my parents at the time). But you're right, I should have, if only to force them them out of business and out of the next guy's misery.

It still may not be too late. Plus other employees who were screwed but unaware of their rights may automatically get checks.

You're suggesting legally chasing a few weeks salary after nearly 20 years? That's quite a grudge you're encouraging, and likely to cost much more than it would gain, even if it could be proven.
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