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

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

#141

Post by prawn »

mekael wrote: post #55

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its runni…

I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.

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

#142

Post by mindcrime »

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…

Add "Crystal Reports" and "MUMPS" to the "do not put on resume" list.

And RPG/400. I took two semesters of that in college, but (thankfully) never got roped into programming in it professionally. I'm honestly not sure you could pay me enough to write RPG code, even if you were Bill Gates. Just thinking about using SEU (Source Entry Utility, IIRC) to program in that column oriented nightmare gives me the heebie-jeebies.

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

#143

Post by Joeri »

userbinator wrote: post #78

Aside from the bureaucracy, that actually sounds like a fun job to me, solving obscure problems and working with things almost no one has heard of, instead of churning out and maintaining boring "cookie-cutter" applications. Then again, I do like retrocomputing, reverse-engineering, and the demoscene... I imagined myself in a job interview in 2010, trying to explain how useful my extensive knowledge of Xenix, PL/M bu…

I expect the job of programmer archaeologist will become a proper category sometime in the next 50 years.

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

#144

Post by _delirium »

steve-howard wrote: post #57
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 found this article from Wired earlier this year: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/air-traffic-control/ It doesn't specificaly mention vacuum tubes, but it does explain why it's entirely plausible that they're still around: >This technology is complicated and novel, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that NextGen is a project of the FAA. The agency is primarily a regulatory body, responsible for keeping the nati…

I'm skeptical that the culprit is mainly to be found in specific features of the FAA, and the article doesn't seem to provide much causal evidence of that (though I recognize that it's hard to prove that kind of causality). Major upgrades/replacements/migrations either failing or coming in a decade late and billions over budget is the norm in Fortune 500 companies, too, which leads to a hypothesis that it's a more general problem with big rewrites of safety/business-critical systems in large organizations.

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

#145

Post by grayclhn »

mekael wrote: post #104
smeyer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.

I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.

Overengineeing doesn't take nearly as much skill as you'd think. It would be pretty easy for any of us to design a wall that, if left alone, would last for thousands of years.

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

#146

Post by D-Coder »

ilaksh wrote: post #138
6stringmerc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When working in risk management business development, my firm was pursuing some line of business with Sabre. Most probably know, but they're in the travel logistics business primarily. A spinoff from American Airlines. Anyway, when I was getting materials together, I reviewed the CEO's summary remarks and looking ahead to the future. Over, and over, and over, and over again he railed at the FAA and government for not…

It is clear to me that the government is not only a criminal organization but also dangerously incompetent. Therefore we have a moral obligation to replace government institutions with high tech systems and protocols that are not reliant on the government for support.

C, C++, bash, javascript...

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

#147

Post by helmut_hed »

I do love war stories, but I think the OP has missed something:

After the meeting one of the managers told me that it was really our job to come up with projects that the customer wanted to buy, not the other way around. And it usually couldn't just be a general project for minor improvements, it'd need clear and ideally measurable goals

I think the OP has misunderstood the nature of consulting. This is exactly what needs to be done to convince X to spend some of their cash on having Y do work for them. You need to make a business case, with concrete duration, cost, goals, and benefits. That this system is a mess is really not in dispute by anyone... but no one will pay to improve it "just because".

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

#148

Post by bigiain »

protomyth wrote: post #94
njharman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also less prone to EMP from nukes.

True, also a well understood technology that they would have no trouble producing.

I bet it's only "well understood" by a very small group of people in 2015.

On the other hand, at least it's _possible_ to make your own at home: http://makezine.com/2008/01/07/make-your-own-vacuum-tube/

I somehow doubt there's many talented amateurs assembling MOSFETs in their garages...

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

#149

Post by jholman »

warfangle wrote: post #111
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

Wow. Their end-goal upgrade, the one that they've installed on one line, and are installing on everything else looks so antiquated.

My city's subway/elevated train system will be 30 years old this December. Train control is fully automated; there are no drivers on trains, and in normal operation there is no remote (human) operator either. It's been automated for 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)

(Side note: during the BART strike, some HN commenters suggested computers to replace drivers, and other commenters said that wouldn't be safe. Such hilarious technophobia on HN.)

I don't want to trivialize NYC's challenges and accomplishments: for one thing their system is far, far more complicated (468 stations on 34 lines, vs 47 stations on 3 lines), and for another we all know it's very hard to upgrade legacy systems.

But I'm astonished that they would work so hard to modernize their 1930s technology to 1970s standards in the 2010s.

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

#150

Post by kjs3 »

jackgavigan wrote: post #46

In a previous life, I was a systems engineer at a company[0] that had several client with what would be charitably termed "legacy" systems, including SCO UnixWare and "Olivetti Unix". 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10048801

Is that Olivetti X/OS or their SVR4 port. X/OS is really legacy.
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