Thursday, May 22, 1997

Programmers in demand as turn of century nears

By DIANA KUNDE / The Dallas Morning News

It's like a Walter Mitty dream come true.

For years, specialists in mainframe computer languages have been out of vogue. Plenty of large corporations still relied on mainframes, but the action was in client-server environments.

The year 2000 problem is changing all that, at least for the time being. As companies scramble to change old two-digit dates embedded in their computer systems, they're also scrambling for talent to do the job.

"It's a finite market. The people still trained in Cobol - which seemed like a dying art - are becoming relatively rare and precious resources," said Jim O'Malley, Year 2000 region sales manager for IBS Conversions Inc. in Chicago. "The rates are starting to go up."

Programmers skilled in Cobol, a basic mainframe language, were pulling down about $35 an hour for contract work a couple of years ago. They're now getting $45 to $70, say the companies that recruit them.

Consulting firms also are searching for analysts to scope out the jobs at client sites and the project managers to see the tasks through.

The stakes are high. Left unchanged, the date problem could affect the operation of anything from elevators to accounts payable departments. Not every company will decide to fix its code. Some will replace their systems, said Wyatt Davis, a manager in Arthur Andersen's Business Consulting Group.

Still, the hiring of specialists who convert systems for the date change is intense. Electronic Data Systems' CIO Services 2000 unit will add 400 people this year and about 1,000 in 1998, said spokesman Ken Capps, even as the firm as a whole is cutting 10 percent of its jobs. Displaced EDS staff get first crack at year 2000 jobs, Capps said.

Jim Thomas, vice president of marketing in Dallas for Bombay, India-based Tata Consultancy Services Inc., said his firm is involved in 50 conversion projects and "growing rapidly. When it's all over and done with, we'll probably have not just our staff, but will use other companies to help us."

All this can be heady stuff for those in demand. There's one catch, though, and it's a big one. In a few short years, the coach could turn into a pumpkin when the clock strikes 2000.

Clinton Carr isn't worried about that. Carr, a senior systems engineer, recently transferred from a job working with electronic commerce on the Internet - one of the 1990s' hot jobs - to one of EDS' CIO Services 2000 teams.

The draw for Carr and others like him is that converting dates embedded in all of an organization's systems means understanding all those systems and how they link. The payoff is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of an enterprise and a high-profile job.

"A lot think it's not very glamorous. It's just dates. But that's not the issue," Carr said. "The issue is understanding the business and how the change is going to ripple down if you make the change. To be able to capture that big picture is a valuable skill. I don't look at it as a step backward."

To Mike Carver, who's about to manage a date conversion project for a major energy company client of EDS, the assignment is high-profile and high-risk with high career potential.

"This is a very critical thing to customers. ... In the past, you may have worked with someone way down in an organization. Now, you're working with the key players," Carver said.

Although EDS is mum about salary levels for competitive reasons, the firm has sweetened the pot with a new compensation package for its year 2000 folks, said Capp, the spokesman. "There's a hot-skill bonus and then performance bonuses, based on the productivity of your team and individual productivity," he said.

Leon Kappelman, an associate professor of information systems at the University of North Texas and a specialist in year 2000 issues, said the key to evaluating such a job is to make sure the work becomes a "stepping stone" to something better.

Leverage the opportunity, he tells students. Negotiate a bonus for seeing the project through. The money can be used for any retraining when the date problems have been fixed.

More important, realize the learning opportunities possible in these complex projects, he said.

"We've never had to deal at this level of complexity with the systems we manage. You are learning what no one has had to learn before," Kappelman said. "Make sure you learn it."