William Payson gets pretty worked up at the mention of a shortage of qualified professionals to help solve the year 2000 computer problem.
What organizations need to do, says the 74-year-old ex-Marine, is hire the retired.
From his home in San Jose, Payson operates Senior Staff, a job information databank for workers older than 50.
He started the business to help seniors get jobs in a variety of professions, but the millennium bug has kicked things into high gear.
Many of the hundreds of thousands of retired or semiretired computer professionals around the world were involved in developing the large mainframe systems that now need to be repaired.
And although systems and software have been altered over the years by succeeding generations, the basic computer language, COBOL, on which they were developed remains.
“It’s tailor-made for older people,” Payson says of the millennium bug.
Senior Staff is not an employment agency, but instead has information on roughly 7,000 retired computer professionals from as far away as Nigeria. The data are provided by the retiree and are not evaluated by Senior Staff, which simply forwards the material to a requesting company or organization.
Payson also has been working with the University of California at Santa Cruz extension program to provide refresher courses for retirees on programming skills and some of the automated tools available to help fix the bug.
With estimates that it will take 600,000 qualified programmers, systems analysts and testers to solve the year 2000 problem, but that there are only about 200,000 in the work force, the potential shortfall is cited as a reason that millennium-bug costs will rise and all systems might not get fixed in time.
More Top Picks Best Fl 41 Glasses For Indoor Use
Payson says there are roughly 300,000 such professionals who either are retired, semiretired, part-time workers or those willing to moonlight, if the price and conditions are right.
“Not everyone is willing to give up the golf course, especially when a lot of these people were trying to warn companies about this problem years ago,” Payson says. “It’s revenge of the dinosaurs. . . . There’s a lot of smoldering resentment.”
In addition, retirees might not want to relocate to work in programming “factories” that are being used by some firms to fix their code off-site, so companies need to be flexible in where the work gets done.
But many seniors want to help, Payson says, as opposed to the younger tech generation that often is only interested in the latest multimedia applications.
Payson says that seniors can be especially useful in helping the majority of American businesses that have fewer than 100 employees, and which are primarily operating with personal computers.