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.
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.
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)
It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's better to direct our limited resources to better porjects with a higher success rate and/or impact.
They'll probably find a few people who will give it a go. The result will probably be delays and failure. Business as usual.