One of the jobs I worked, there was an older programmer, who had been their since the company was created, or very soon afterward. He survived Vietnam, learned COBOL via the GI Bill at a college, programmed the system underlying the /entire/ financial data system(s) of the company, from paying employees to receiving vendor payments to intracomapany finances… everything.

Before I left that job, we would talk often. He told me that his whole career, not a single VP or manager /ever/ listened to his constructive criticism or concerns about requests to make the system do something that would cause a problem later on down the line, that would be incompatible with other systems his stuff integrated with, either internal or external to the company, or often just asks to design totally useless features or even design things according to a manager of VPs specs, even though he explained to them that their design was fundamentally flawed from a programming perspective and not actually ever be able to work at even a test use case at all, because the higher ups think they know how to write code, but actually do not.

He explained to me that he had been telling them for 3 years he was going to retire, and that they needed to find a replacement programmer who knows COBOL, as the way the company’s systems have culture have evolved will mean that his code his systems, will /need/ constant updates and tweaks to keep utter chaos from ensuing in his absence.

He then further explained to me that he knew they would not do this because of ignorance and arrogance… and that within a year of him departing he expected to be billing them 3x his current hourly rate as a contractor.

Management seema to have assumed they could hire 2 to 3 programmers similar to me, a young relatively novice programmer at the time, to replace him with a few ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’ for a total of maybe 2/3 of his current wages.

They did not understand that COBOL is a dead programming language that hasnt been taught in Computer Science courses at basically any American University since, at best, the early 90s… and that anyone who actually knows COBOL would by definition be a very senior programmer, and literally laugh at the pitiful wage they were offering to non existent ‘Junior COBOL Programmers’.

And so, he left, within 3 months other systems in the company evolved until they broke the underlying COBOL system. Cue 3 months of ‘make everything reliant on the COBOL code work witbout touching rhe COBOL code’ for me, which is of course impossible because the parts of it some of my reports drew from were now outputting either nothing, or an error code.

Meanwhile, many other departments are having similar problems, everyone is overworked tryi g to come up with bandaid workarounds for their particular systems in a hurry, without documenting what they are doing, and I have to keep up with all of this to produce my more top level, big picture reports that add all the little details together.

I leave because the stress is too much, and within another 3 months, he is being contracted to fix the mess he told them would happen if ttheydid not do what he suggested.

This all happened because Managers and VPs are full of themselves, think they understand everything, focus on trimming the fat instead of making sustainable long term decisions, and of course are mainly focused soley on next quarter profits.

The amount of money that the company lost because of the chaos that ensued was at least one order of magnitude, possibly nearly two by the time the elder COBOL wizard was hired back on as a contractor… nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than if they had just hired his replacement at roughly similar wages as him.

And I would know those numbers, because my job included making the monthly reports on the profitability of every single department of the business before handing those off to my boss, who presented them to the VPs and the CEO in the main executive conference room roughly 25 feet from my cubicle on the top floor of the building.

What I learned from that job is that VPs and CEOs are the most expensive employees to pay wages to at a company, and at best are barely more useful to the company than if I had simply tied my own executive level reports into a fairly simple decision tree program to output business leadership position decisions. Oh. That and they rolodexes of other people to wheel and deal with in the industry.

VPs and CEOs barely do any actual work, the ‘work’ they actually do is easy enough to codify into maybe a couple hundred lines of computer code and then automate… oh right, and hook up to a rolodex to deliver barely ever reworded emails to various people.

But we will figure out how to fully automate McDonalds employees before we automate CEOs.