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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.