Home Office hit by millennium bug!

Capodecina
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A 101-year-old Italian man who has been in London since 1966 was asked to get his parents to confirm his identity by the Home Office after he applied to stay in the country post-Brexit

When the volunteer who helped Palmiero, a great-grandfather, scanned his passport into the EU settled status app to share the biometric data with the Home Office, the system misinterpreted his birth year as 2019 instead of 1919.
Excellent, COBOL lives on :D
 
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And to think people on this very forum were claming the millenium bug was really a big scare and nothing happened:p

I'm guessing it's not even that the applications/software behind this is that old, just someone forgot (or wasn't around for) the lessons of the y2k issues ;)

I mean this is going to be an outlying case, in that there won't be many 100+ year old people doing it, but it does show that someone (or probably several people) didn't think that programming the app to recognise more than 100 years difference between DOB and current date was worth the extra two digits.
 
Caporegime
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I wonder what the going rate for COBOL contractors in London is these days.

Probably not bad at all, especially if coupled with some domain knowledge (bonus points if it is obscure stuff others find very boring too).

It's not the only niche (these days at least) language either (there are lots of them in banks/financial technology), plenty of old blokes out there who are quite content with this stuff, just turning up and collecting a fat salary for doing lots of boring small changes/fixes on some mess of a legacy system no one else wants to touch.
 
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A friend of mine was a COBOL developer in London until recently. His contract rate wasn't that great but I think he was selling himself short a bit.
My view on this sort of thing is although it is in decline, it's also true that not many new people will be learning it and the pool of resources will the skillset will also be diminishing. So anyone the right side of 50 can probably continue making money off the 'dead' technology.

As for the scenario at hand, I've seen this a few times where systems only give two digits for a year
 
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The problem with being a COBOL developer in the UK is twofold. Firstly if you are a permanent employee then you are probably working for a large company such as a bank. They have strict salary scales which means you won't get paid more than any other developer. Those employees are most likely to be nearing retirement soon. Secondly if you are a contractor then the entire financial industry contract marked has just been wiped out with the governments IR35 rules which are getting even tougher in April. Most banks have said they won't take on contractors at all from April to avoid getting caught by it. Well done government /facepalm

So the future for COBOL developers isn't great in this country. It's a shame because although it's not my normal job I used to be a COBOL developer. I might have been tempted to have another go at it if contract rates were good. I think companies will struggle to get people to maintain their legacy code now.

I can confirm that Y2K was very lucrative though :D
 
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^ this! *rubs hands* ridiculous time to be a contractor! I was only ever exposed to COBOL and dBaseIV at college mind; never touched it in the real world.
I remember in 1998 or so, walking through Waterloo station on the way home and being stopped by recruiters looking for developers and Y2K project managers. They flat out said they could offer me £750 per day and I guess I could have negotiated higher if I was interested in it. I know of one guy working for me earning over £1k per day.

But it wasn't just contractors. I heard of permies being offered very large sums of money to commit to not resigning for a year or two. I guess they had to do that to stop people walking into £750pd contracts :D

It's very different to today where rates are pushed down constantly and several weeks furlough are enforced every Christmas. I looked on the internal job board for a large bank recently and there were no IT jobs in London at all. Sad times. I think I need a Plan B.
 
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Some interesting comments on COBOL. I'm wondering what the market will be like in 20 years time for Java developers when the youngsters have all moved over to whatever hot new trendy comes. I'm scoping out keeping myself busy in my 70's :)
 
Caporegime
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Some interesting comments on COBOL. I'm wondering what the market will be like in 20 years time for Java developers when the youngsters have all moved over to whatever hot new trendy comes. I'm scoping out keeping myself busy in my 70's :)

I don't think it's going away anytime soon... all those 20yr old Indian devs will then be in their 40s?
 
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Some interesting comments on COBOL. I'm wondering what the market will be like in 20 years time for Java developers when the youngsters have all moved over to whatever hot new trendy comes. I'm scoping out keeping myself busy in my 70's :)
Just about every Indian developer is taught Java at school. So there will be no shortage.
 
Soldato
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COBOL is still a very powerful stable and efficient language. there's a reason it's still being used since the 70s and dozens of new trendy flavour-of-the-month languages have vanished after a few months of celebrity status. the passport issue has nothing to do w/ the language, it has to do w/ someone not defining the record properly to hold the century indicator. that sort of error would occur in any language.
 
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Only another 18 years until the real millennium bug bites. Wonder if we'll have a feeding frenzy, might be tempted to go back to software for a year or two and top up just before retirement. Fingers crossed.
 

Deleted member 66701

D

Deleted member 66701

I wonder what the going rate for COBOL contractors in London is these days.

I regularly do very short term contracts (20/30hrs work) for the Dwp for cobol/vme work. £90 p/h is about average, and that's in the North West, not London.
 
Soldato
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One of the reasons the Y2K bug was not as bad as some thought is because the code got fixed :). I was working with a company back then using tools to fix code automatically for big clients. Was a nice little earner for the company too - £25 per line of code changed I think. Many thousands of £ made in seconds running the tool against large banking related source code. The company struggled once Y2k was over, unsurprisingly.
 
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It's not just Y2K, but there are quite a few date and time related bugs <- click for Wiki.

A lot of them are due to 16 bits rolling over to 32 (or 64) bit and the computer doesn't understand variables over 16 bit etc, so the date rolls back to the start date. Sometimes, it's how the program is written and the variable was assigned as 16 bit and so when the value exceeds 32768, it will flip to -32768 and the program will generate a date based on the negative value.

Some computers are hard-coded to only understand a date range. E.g. my BBC Master only can understand years 1981 to 1999. After 31.12.1999, it rolled back to 1981.
 
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