Re: Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?

On 10/11/96, Matt Bovee composed a News article about Question: How will the Year 2000 bug impact your work?: As an independent computer consultant, I expect the Y2000 issue to affect my work as follows: 1. As the deadline (Jan 1, 2000 note: this is NOT the turn of the century) approaches, I fully expect that every warm body that can code will be parachuted off the street and press-ganged into service madly revising legacy systems to be able to limp into the next century without doing actual or imagined harm to the reputations or orgainzations that are running them. 2. This increased demand will escalate rates to stratospheric levels for the duration of the "need" with a corresponding collapse during or shortly after the year 2000 when a "glut" of recently un-employed "consultants" hits the streets. This analysis leads to the following conclusions : 1. As rates are rising, commit to short term contracts or those that can be re-negotiated more frequently. There will be a LOT of staff movement right up to 6 months before the deadline. 2. Just before the deadline, try to lock yourself into a longer term contract at prevailing (assumably inflated) rates to tide you through the "glut" that will surely follow. The moral of this story is to make hay while the sun shines in order to have some left for those rainy days. The sun has been shining brightly on SAP related occupations for quite some time now. They are about to have a lot of company. Even today there are "experts" out there flogging themselves as Y2000 gurus. Some are legitimate, competent professionals that understand the issues and even have experience (already) at providing solutions, but as always it is buyer-beware. I've been building systems and applications since 1970. Since 1980 I have not designed or built a single application that will fall on its face Jan 1, 2000. For the last 10 years I have constantly stated that I only needed to keep hunting contracts until 1995 because after that they will be hunting you!...at least until 1999-2000 Happy hunting. -- Bill Scollard - Scollard Holdings Ltd. Computer Systems : Cradle-to-Grave Calgary, Alberta, Canada