Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day, dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically. …

[Korev]

He therefore donated his fees to the care home where he lives.

Are there care homes out there run by charities? The story suggests that Roger is in the UK, most UK care homes appear to be run very much for the profit of the owners.

[Caver_Dave]

You need a very well paid job to make it worth not giving up work yourself and looking after your parents, rather than pay the exorbitant fees in Nursing Homes.

Or, if your parents have no assets and are looked after by the state.

[Phil O'Sophical]

If he only retired in 2021 but is now in a care home, it would suggest that he retired late or perhaps has some health issues. Either way he may have sufficiently few assets that the state pays some or all of his care, and suddenly adding a few £k to his savings could change that. Making a gift to the care home, say for new furniture or TVs, could solve that problem, while also benefiting his daily life. His business, really, not relevant to the story.

[MachDiamond]

"If he only retired in 2021 but is now in a care home, it would suggest that he retired late or perhaps has some health issues."

There can be a gradation of care levels. Where my mother lives and owns her condo, she has a monthly fee that covers all sorts of things such as appliances, HVAC, grounds, building exterior, security, etc. In the same community, there are options for meals being provided, transportation on-call up to full bed-ridden care for those that can't look after themselves at all. Going the other way, there's some very nice single homes and duplexes for those that can afford them and don't require any support outside of grounds maintenance, security and the numerous community facilities.

[Confucious2]

What’s a ‘Condo’? Certainly not something you have in England. I’m sure things are very different where you live.

[Miss_X2m1]

Condo

It's a condominium. A condo (short for condominium) is a privately owned individual unit within a larger building or community where owners share ownership of common areas like hallways, elevators, and recreational facilities.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: Condo

Round these parts it's called a "Flat"

[MachDiamond]

Re: Condo

"Round these parts it's called a "Flat""

You then have to clarify if it's an owned or rented flat. An apartment in the US would be a rented flat and a condo would be owned. The terms do get used interchangeably in places. It's a big country.

[pirxhh]

Indeed. When I looked for a furnished studio apartment for rent in the mid-sized town my new semi-retirement job is located, I got a (quite economical) offer for such an apartment in an assisted-living facility, It allows residents to move in while they are fully self-sufficient and avoid having to move later when they might want more help.

[DS999]

In the city where I live

There is a retirement community that lets people age in place. The way it works is that you "buy" (but don't own) a condo in one of their buildings, with different prices for e.g. one bedroom, two bedroom, luxury whatever. There are relatively modest monthly fees, and you basically live your normal life in that condo as if it was any other condo. There are meals, activities and all that available but you don't have to do that, you can treat it as if it is just your apartment. There are people who buy in before they actually retire (I think their age limit is 55, so there would be a lot of time to keep working if you buy in the day you become eligible) and others who wait until they are actually retired.

The neat thing about it is that as you age and start needing more care that's built into the price you paid for your condo. You didn't buy the condo, you bought the right to reside in the community. So if you need some occasional help you stay in your original condo, and they have staff that can provide that help. At some point you need a bit more care and you'd move to a different building that's sort of like a rehab center, and if you get sicker you move to one that's a traditional nursing home, up to where you may need round the clock care. It is all covered in that price you paid to move into that condo maybe decades ago. The monthly fees stay the same (i.e. probably increase over time but you don't pay more to live in the nursing home setting than you did in your original condo)

It is a non profit operated by a volunteer board of community members and residents, so I imagine if one of residents had a windfall and chose to donate to uncomplicate his taxes they would be very appreciative! They probably receive a lot of donations as part of the estate of some of their former residents. It is far and away better than any "nursing home", but the catch is in order for it to make sense you have to buy in in advance. Once you already need care they won't accept you, you have to be able to live independently at the time you move in.

[retiredFool]

Re: In the city where I live

A friend's father did something similar I think. He had to buy in (and the estate sells it at death) and came and went as he pleased. The trick was the waiting list as I think many of these have. I think it took a year from the time he put in the offer until a apartment became available. I'm not sure if that facility had nursing home level care and if they did, if pricing was fixed like the one you describe. It does seem like a nice way to age. Another friend's mom lived in a detached home community similar. Small homes and cal, so weather was nice enough normally for residents to walk to the central dining areas.

[DS999]

Re: In the city where I live

Yeah this one doesn't leave your estate with anything to pass onto your heirs.

The price you pay for your condo is essentially an up front payment for your remaining lifetime for "rent" and future care. Kind of buying an annuity and applying it to your future housing and care needs - except that it isn't adjusted based on your remaining life expectancy so it isn't less expensive to buy at age 80 than age 60.

They have a waiting list but it tends to be for certain types of rooms not in general. They are sufficiently well funded that they are able to build enough to mostly stay ahead of need. About five years ago they opened up a large new building in their complex, and last year they opened up a new one across town since I think they don't have any remaining land to expand in their main location without buying/bulldozing the apartment buildings (mostly occupied by grad student types) that surround them.

[dak]

There are two care homes in Scotland run by charities - one is across the road from me, where my MiL now resides.

[Doctor Syntax]

That's almost point plank range for her.

Despite all the MiL jokes I always got on well with mine.

[Doctor Syntax]

Dammit - blank!

[keith_w]

I often got along better with my MIL than I did with my ex-wife''s.

[Rob Daglish]

Point Plank - is that the one that changes depending on how long the piece of wood is?

[GlenP]

There are many UK care homes run by charities, often (but not always) relating to the services or specific professions.

[Falmor]

I think unless you run a high end care home, you don't make much profit. I know someone who was running a care home but is no being made bankrupt to pay off the debts. Apparently, this isn't that uncommon with 1 in 4 care homes at risk of going under: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/161

[Anonymous Coward]

The people making money from care homes in the UK are the Vulture Capitalists who buy the home, jack up the fees and then load the homes up with debt, which goes to the VCs. A point comes when the home goes into administration, then the VC's wheelbarrow the earnings away, probably offshore.

[Missing Semicolon]

Charity care homes.

Yes there are, as it happens.

[Rob Daglish]

Yes. The Methodist Homes (MHA) who looked after my Dad's step-mother were one, who were able to make a generous bursary (for want of a better word!) towards her care. So that's around 80 homes. There may be others, but let's just say Care Homes of the UK wouldn't be my specialist subject if I were ever to make an appearance on Mastermind!

[AlanSh]

Ah, the tax man

And that is why I have refused all offers of employment since I retired. I'd lose 40% of it anyway and the tax man would suddenly get very interested...

[Korev]

Re: Ah, the tax man

There's a similar issue for people in low incomes in the UK; if they earn above a certain threshold for a month then they lose access their benefits for weeks and may even have to apply again. This incentivises against taking on extra shifts at work or even doing temporary work whilst unemployed...

[GlenP]

Re: Ah, the tax man

You can do up to 15 hours per week whilst continuing to be "signed on" as I found when my previous employers asked me to help out, at a rate of several hundred pounds per day! I agreed on the understanding that I would do 2 7.5 hour days a week. I did discuss it with my adviser at the Job Centre and completed the relevant form but their view was that keeping some work experience going was a "good thing". I would have signed off if necessary - I was being paid several times what I was getting in any benefits.

Due to timing of payslips I did get a letter stating I'd worked while signed on and been overpaid benefits but I just replied with the circumstances and never heard anything back.

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: Ah, the tax man

There's a story highlighted by Private Eye whereby if you go over the threshold by £0.01, the government can claw back thousands of pounds in benefit payments.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Ah, the tax man

A member of our local history group was a popular speaker for various local organisations. He always told them to give any fees to charities of their choice rather than get entangled with tax issues.

[GlenP]

Re: Ah, the tax man

I used to do the same, I'm probably the only person to have been paid for a talk in lamp irons (aka fencing pins) after the organisation I gave a talk to donated the money for them to the canal restoration group I was involved with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

And that's another reason why our successive governments don't know what the hell they are doing when it comes to finance.

The 40% limit should have been raised long ago so you have to earn at least £70k before paying 40% tax.

Other than give it to charity to avoid the tax, if he has a drawdown pension and enough time before the end of the current financial year he could have paused his pension payouts by the amounts he was being paid.

At the end of the year his earnings would have been exactly the same as they would have been but now he has the equivalent amount extra in his pension earning 10%. He could also put £10k into a private pension and avoid paying 40% tax.

Something he wouldn't have been able to do if he had an annuity pension or no private pension.

It's his money to do what he wants with but unless you aren't interested in doing your homework when it comes to UK tax it's always a good idea to run it past an independent financial adviser as you can often save yourself from making some expensive financial mistakes.

And if he enjoyed himself while sorting their problems out and getting paid £2.5K a day while avoiding 40% tax .. why not.

[Hawkeye Pierce]

Re: Ah, the tax man

To state that the 40% tax band should kick in at £70K without saying where (or if) you would raise the approx £17b in lost revenue is really pretty pointless. By way of example, if you kept the additional rate threshold at circa £125K you'd need to raise the 45% tax rate to 57% rate.

It's easy to band figures around as to what tax rates should be. It's a lot harder to balance the books!

[Persona]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Indeed, you also need to test the assumption that £17b would be lost by raising the tax threshold. I know plenty of people, me included, who have retired early or are working part time because the tax burden of those extra hours changes the work life balance. Had the state been less greedy they could have got more tax revenue.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Sadly once you are in receipt of a pension the amount you can pay into a pension is very limited and a lot less than 10k.

Yet another disincentive to going back to work...

[Julian Bradfield]

Re: Ah, the tax man

? The Money Purchase Annual Allowance, which is what you can pay in to a pension after having taken a taxable payment, is 10k (gross), isn't it?

[gusty]

Re: Ah, the tax man

indeed. successive UK governments have lamented an issue about getting people back into work in order stimulate growth but have placed every barrier and disincentive in the way of the retired to do so. I think I recall a while back a suggestion by one of them to alleviate the pension/tax barrier specifically for one group (doctors perhaps it was) but then heard nothing more about it. Not convinced he new boy knows what he is doing any better than the last half dozen did..

[midgepad]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Better to start taxation at 40% on any income over, say, £1000 and raise the minimum pay and benefits amounts so that 60% is a liveable income.

And put the costs of licencing and regulation largely and mostly through the Treasury, so the people who allegedly benefit from regulation exert control on what is spent on it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Ah, the tax man

"when it comes to UK tax it's always a good idea to run it past an independent financial adviser as you can often save yourself from making some expensive financial mistakes"

That's always assuming the amount is big enough to make it worthwhile after paying the fees for the advice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

The taxman cometh with outstretched palm... Cross my palm with silver and I might turn into Long John Silver....

I was in the same sort of situation. I got the company to make a large donation to a charity that I'm involved with. That donation allowed us to bring forward a lot of work that was at the time unfunded.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Now that's a though process I've never understood -- not wanting money because you'll be taxed on it.

Personally, I'm semi-retired and if someone wants to give me money for doing work, I'll gladly take it, even if I have to choke up a chunk of it come the 15th of April ("Tax Day" here in the States). I just make sure not to spend it all before then.

Having some money always strikes me as better than having no money.

Now we can probably argue all day about where that money goes, whether or not it's a good use, and where we'd rather have it go but that's a discussion for some other forum.

I had a minor argument with my stock broker¹ about selling some shares in a for-the-moment high flying company. He kept arguing we shouldn't sell because we'd be paying huge capital gains taxes since we got in early and the difference between the cost basis and the sale price was substantial.²

I made the point that I'd rather "share" 20 percent with the IRS, et al, than share negative percent when the bottom finally falls out of this idiotic bubble market. Even if, nay, when, the price drops only 20 percent, I'm still out that 20 percent plus the 20 percent on the remaining 80 percent.

Would I rather have 100 percent of the money? Sure, but that's just the way it works.³

Rejecting money just because of the tax seems a bit silly.

If it's the paperwork, hire a good accountant and let them worry about it.

It's cheaper than therapy.

___________________

¹ Stock broker and my are words that for the longest time I thought I'd never utter in the same sentence.

² Living proof that like the very wealthy, even the moderately well off are often more lucky than smart.

³ And don't give me a bunch of Ayn Rand guff or, as Ed Zitron puts it, I'll pile drive you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Now that's a though process I've never understood -- not wanting money because you'll be taxed on it.

Thanks to the incomprehensible bizarrities of UK tax law, there are breakpoints where you can add a relatively small amount of income, and end up paying >60% tax on it. For may people the extra work just isn't worth the additional pittance you're left with.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Ah, the tax man

I am not a tax expert (which is why I have an accountant) and certainly not one on the UK's system but as I understand marginal tax rates¹, as you move your way through the brackets, the "marginal tax rates only apply to the portion of income within each bracket, not your entire income," so your actual take-home after taxes when you escalate through the brackets never goes down but you get to keep less of it per bracket.

I guess if you're at the top of a bracket and the extra income barely puts you into the next bracket you might feel that the return on your work is not worth the time but I suspect that's more of a corner case.

But even so, you folks get national healthcare, while we just get more complicated rules about insurance, so there are definite tradeoffs.

I'll shut up now.

___________________

¹ Investopedia: Marginal Tax Rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

UK taxpayers have an allowance of £12,750 before they pay any tax, but once income exceeds a certain threshold that allowance is gradually reduced to zero, shifting more income into higher tax brackets, so the result is non-linear. Add to that the childcare allowance which disappears above that threshold, and the cap on lifetime pension savings relief, a small income increase above the threshold will have a disproportionate effect on total income tax. It's one reason that senior NHS doctors and surgeons refuse to be called in to do extra hours, it costs them too much.

[gusty]

Re: Ah, the tax man

"But even so, you folks get national healthcare, while we just get more complicated rules about insurance, so there are definite tradeoffs."

Theoretically yes. you clearly have not experienced UK healthcare in practice. 13 hours waiting in a A&E alongside the drunks and drug addled before you are seen and then lying on a trolley in a corridor for more then 24 hours because thee are no hospital beds, is a common experience. You have something similar in the USA - its the free clinics in impoverished areas of big cities I believe. As for general practice - ah yes I remember I once saw a GP - for barely 5 minutes. But it was a beautiful majestic thing I'll never forget... And as for getting a dental appointment............

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Been there, done that.

Multiple hours waiting in a tent outside the ER (A&E for you Brits) before even seeing the triage nurse.

Multiple hours waiting in a chair in the hallway, waiting for a physician.

And that's with excellent insurance and an excellent hospital system (I'm a bit biased there, since I used to be employed by the university's School of Medicine, which runs it).

On the other hand, having been hauled into the ER in an ambulance in a pretty serious cardiac incident, I had swift and competent care. Yay EMTs and yay nurses and yay cardiologists.

On the third hand, I have an acquaintence who, while American, spends a fair bit of time in London and tells me that the emergency service he had was both quick and excellent. And they looked at him like he had a parrot cage on his other head when he asked how he should pay.

Yeah, in general, getting sick or injured is a pretty rotten experience, especially on a Friday or Saturday night when the drunks do stupid things to themselves and others, a classic casse of too many idiots and not enough doctors. And don't even get me started on the underpaid, overworked residents.

Oh, and dental? That's an entirely different insurance package that basically covers (most of) a couple of cleanings. Implant? Better have your credit card handy and hope it's got a high limit.

[Dagg]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Having experienced ER/A&E in NZ, UK, US and Australia the worst and scariest experience was the US. I had never seen the result of gun violence before in my life (and NEVER want to again) when I was in the waiting room.

I was in an ER in an Austin TX hospital and couldn't work out want was going on. This was like nothing I ever been through in a hospital I asked the nurse "what is going on" she looked at me and said "Are you a Kiwi?", I replied yep. And her comment scared the crap out of me. "Yep same here, they're not treating you to cure you, they're treating you so you can't sue them" All I could think of was WTF?!

[Scott 26]

Re: Ah, the tax man

> marginal tax rates only apply to the portion of income within each bracket, not your entire income,

We are in an election year here in NZ, and one of the oppostion parties has suggested a 'wealth' tax (basically a new tax bracket: 45% at 160k)... well, you should see all the wailing and knashing of teeth from the right. Until someone pointed out the 45% would only apply to earnings over the threshold. (Didn't stop the right from still moaning though... Shock! Horror! More at 10!)

You'd think some basic civics understanding would be mandatory to enter a life of policitics.... apparently not.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Ah, the tax man

It's not the being taxed on it, it's the sheer amount of embuggerment involved in dealing with HMRC. Unless you have an accountant you're likely to end up worse off than you were and if it's only a small amount of money the cost of engaging an accountant will ensure you end up worse off than when you started. It's a matter of having some money versus having less money.

[Xalran]

Re: Ah, the tax man

Here (Land of the Frogs) as a retiree you can work as long as you don't earn more than 160% of what we call the SMIC (Salaire Minimum de Croissance, minimum growth salary) each month.

Any money earned over that is deducted from your pension.

And obviously you get to pay revenue taxes on them (but you have to pay them on your pension too anyway)

[MachDiamond]

Re: Ah, the tax man

"And that is why I have refused all offers of employment since I retired. I'd lose 40% of it anyway and the tax man would suddenly get very interested..."

For giggles, working out at what point none of that matters might be worth doing. A company looking at defending themselves against a big tax fraud allegation might be willing to spend a few bob to keep that from happening.

I might also be tempted to form MeAndaFriend, LLC with a mate and let the company pay that entity for software services and have the LLC do some nice things for me that aren't "salary". The kids could be employed to provide office services in the same way that family members of a politician's non-profit hire and over-pay their kids for nebulous things.

[Scott 26]

Re: Ah, the tax man

> the same way that family members of a politician's non-profit hire and over-pay their kids for nebulous things.

of course, "rules for me and not for thee" apply here, so your idea won't work, unless you also become a politician.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Ah, the tax man

"of course, "rules for me and not for thee" apply here, so your idea won't work, unless you also become a politician."

Well, they wouldn't be making millions and might even be expected to earn some of the pay doing something useful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

I'm presently on a "contract" where I get paid by 9kWh lithium batteries falling off the back of a lorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ah, the tax man

How much do you charge? ...

[Scott 26]

Re: Ah, the tax man

9kW per hour, obviously! :D

[Caver_Dave]

Y2K

This reminds me of a guy I saw at a large multinational in the summer of 1998. He had sparse grey hair, 'shakes' and had to be helped around the room by someone who looked at least 50 years his junior. Apparently, he was training the younger person on the very old code he had written long ago, in preparation for Y2K work.

[MiguelC]

Re: Y2K

He was Old Johannsen and I claim his £5

[Xalran]

Re: Y2K

Ah, Y2K... the 2 days when you earned a month salary just to hang in the office and play computer games (that's what I did on the 31st and on the 1st during the day, a colleague had the night shift for the products we both were supporting and did the same)

Obviously I went straight from the office to partying with friends doe the new year to back to the office... It was the time when sleep deprival was not an issue and I could keep going for days with just a few naps here and there.

[phuzz]

As someone born in the 1980's, this talk of 'retirement' makes the story sound like fantasy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Born in the 80s... so you're about half way to retirement then. Just another 40ish years to go.

(No, I'm not joking)

[NorthIowan]

Just another 40ish years to go.

Assuming there is still retirement then.

Makes me nervous seeing all the old people working at the grocery store now. Used to be a lot of kids in school making up at least half the crew.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Just another 40ish years to go.

"Makes me nervous seeing all the old people working at the grocery store now. "

In the US with minimum wage being raised dramatically in some places, the work output may be the same for older and younger workers with the older workers far more reliable. The trade was a low wage in exchange for almost no hiring requirements and very flexible scheduling. With higher pay, employers find it easier to hire full time older workers that aren't as likely to flake on them.

The older workers at the grocery don't have to be told that the yellow thing is a vegetable and the red thing a fruit.

[phuzz]

At which point I'll already be dead, because average life expectancy has been shrinking at the same time as retirement age has been rising. I'm assume they'll have crossed over by the time I get there.

[Korev]

Here in Switzerland they've just introduced a "13th month" pension payment and haven't worked out how to pay for it yet. The most likely outcome will be an increase in VAT which means that my generation's ability to save for my own retirement is reduced with no guarantee that we'll get any significant state pension at all.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But Switzerland has worked our how to pay for ever more generous pensions with a shrinking working age population by simply banning immigration

[The Indomitable Gall]

Proving that the immigrants were the problem all along!

Nigel has clearly earned his millions and millions unreported income. He will make us into a new Switzerland!!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Well since they aren't in the Eu they can take back control and make their own rules.

That's why they voted for lower taxes and higher pensions

[H in The Hague]

"But Switzerland has worked our how to pay for ever more generous pensions with a shrinking working age population by simply banning immigration"

Nope, for the past 27 years or so, the EU and Switzerland have had mutual freedom of movement:

https://www.sem.admin.ch/sem/en/home/themen/fza_schweiz-eu-efta.html

(I think there are also other agreements between the EU and CH which means CH has many of the benefits of being an EU member, and pays into the EU budget, without actually being an EU member, which means they don't get to vote on EU regulations. I think there are similar deals with Norway.)

[andy the pessimist]

There is a significant amount of cross border working between switzerland and the neighbouring countries.

Switzerland voted against the proposition to restrict the population to 10 million.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some increasingly problematic cross-border issues. If you live in France but work in Switzerland, and get laid off, France is on the hook to pay unemployment benefits, but based on your Swiss salary, for example. Not popular with the French government, needless to say, and being renegotiated...

[Bob Royal]

Only 12 months in a year?

The UK state pension has always been paid 13 times a year, every 4 weeks.

But don't tell HMRC - the taxman, he's never worked out that it's 1 at the old & 12 at the new rate.

They tax you on some fictitious amount rather than what you've actually been paid.

Nowt you can do about that.

[Doctor Syntax]

It's alarming to think that my own children, born in the 1970s, are now about the same age as I was when I was booted into early retirement, AKA freelancing.

[Anonymous Custard]

I can empathise (from the other direction) - I'm a few months away from being the same age as when my late father took early retirement.

And in my case, I've still got about 13 years to go to the standard retirement age (I'm possibly about the same age as the good Doctor's kids ;) ).

[Doctor Syntax]

With the freelancing I ended up going about 2 years over what would have been my last employer's normal mandatory requirement age and my last client's mandatory requirement age. I think I must have looked a bit younger than I was because the client wanted me to join them as their programming manager. In the end it was they guy they recruited's lack of ability to make a decision that finally made me decide to pack it in. That and remembering that all my male paternal relatives of previous generations died about 71 or 72 and I wanted to get more retirement in than they did.

But a word of advice. If you've something you want to get done, do it before you retire. You'll be too busy afterwards.

[Scott 26]

> If you've something you want to get done, do it before you retire. You'll be too busy afterwards.

ex-colleague 'stupidly' bought a pub in his retirement.

I called in at Xmas:

"How's retirement?"

"Retirement? I've never been so busy, 16+ hour days, fixing this, negoiating that, etc etc"

Because it was Xmas holidays, he had his kids working as well. As one of them walked passed he said "one day this will be all theirs"... all he got back was a rolling of the eyes :D

[MachDiamond]

"But a word of advice. If you've something you want to get done, do it before you retire. You'll be too busy afterwards."

No kidding!

I don't work as fast as I used to. Doing myself an injury is a concern and I don't want to have to do it over again (again). I like to believe that the quality of my work has gone up much faster than the quantity has gone down.

[MachDiamond]

"As someone born in the 1980's, this talk of 'retirement' makes the story sound like fantasy."

As I continually harp about, there isn't any personal financial training in school. To have a comfortable retirement without having had won a lottery is good to plan from the start of one's working phase. Getting into the later years and owning nothing but a fancy car and memories is a problem. Making sure that the boxes at the bottom of Maslow's pyramid are all ticked is a good way of keeping score. My current major project for a couple of years now is energy independence. If all I have to buy at the end of the year is a refill of propane every so often to run the stove, I'll be in a good place. Savings is one side of the ledger and monthly expenses is the other. Working on both is key.

[ComicalEngineer]

In the early 1990s I was involved in some complicated explosion modelling using software that ran under DOS. The code was written by Stanford University and performed calculations that took several minutes using a fast 486. For convenience I compiled the code to run in a DOS box under Windows. I used the code numerous times through the 1990s until I left the company. As the code was public domain, I kept a copy on a floppy disc. It's a complicated piece of code and requires a thorough knowledge of thermodynamics plus the relevant data files for each component in the calculation (think three books each of 800 pages).

Almost 20 years later the original client (long since divested and bought out by a large corporation) found me via LinkedIn and asked if I could carry out some additional calculations to cover the changes to their process. It turns out that the code was no longer available on line with the code writer being (I believe) deceased. Of my old company only 6 of us used the code and they were all retired or (in one case) dead.

The code was last used under W98 but it turned out that it would happily run under W7.

The job put a goodly chunk of cash into my pension fund.

[Korev]

A former employer moved from Subversion to a git based system, instead of archiving properly they said anyone who needs anything from SVN please move it yourself. I'm sure there is a load of productive code which was written by former employees which has disappeared (subverted?) into a hole.

[Anonymous Coward]

UGH changing ticket systems

My group changed from TFS to Bitbucket/JIRA a couple years ago. The only "conversion" utility grabbed about 25% of the ticket text, losing all the comments and attachments. Totally useless.

A lot of those TFS attachments were bespoke scripts written to solve the ticket in question, and that code was later referenced when similar issues re-occurred. I would have been absolutely screwed if that disappeared, so I had major skin in the game.

I spent 6 weeks writing Python code and learning MS SQL Server so I could reach into the TFS backend internals to pull the data out, and learning git internals so I could put the data back in. I think I wrote nearly 2K lines of code... and I wrote it in testable modules as I went, so it ran perfectly the second time.

I feel that was a crowning achievement of 46 years of coding and I enjoy the benefits daily.

Other groups... did not do this. And didn't want my help. Several of them have been defunded since then.

[An_Old_Dog]

Code on Floppy Diskette

<Inserts 5¼" floppy diskette with sole remaining copy of source code into drive.>

<Twists down the latching lever, loading the heads.>

C:\>DIR A:[Enter]

*UHN-UHN-EEE-EEE-UHN-UHN-UHN*

*UHN-UHN-EEE-EEE-UHN-UHN-UHN*

ERROR READING DRIVE A: Abort, Retry, Fail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code on Floppy Diskette

I copied a small stack of 5 1/4" disks to disk images a couple years ago. Surprisingly, I got about an 80% error-free success rate; the ones that failed were ones I recalled having trouble with 20 years before!

[ComicalEngineer]

Re: Code on Floppy Diskette

Thankfully I'd moved the software from 5.25" --> 3.5" --> CD ROM --> USB stick --> external HDD (with 2 backups)

I have some backup files that date back to 1993 which are still readable as they are now on HDD

Some older CD ROMs have deteriorated to being unreadable, but thankfully I'd copied most of them onto the HDD on a desktop before they failed.

[Pete 2]

Proof of pension

> Have you been hauled out of retirement to support ancient tech

Not as such, but the process of (successfully) getting a pension due from a company I worked for nearly 40 years ago did require digging out a bunch of data from the 1980s.

Briefly, when the time came, I had approached said employer. Only to find that they had been taken over, sold off and been consumed by some other conglomerate.

HMGs "find your pension" service was remarkably unhelpful, listing about 30 different pension schemes for various branches of the multinational I had worked at. Applications to all the most likely suspects usually brought no response, or occasionally a "we have no record of your employment".

Contact ex-colleagues bore fruit and it turned that one outfit I had applied to was the one they were getting their pensions from. I followed up, naming my co-workers and got a response "we have no record of your employment"

Fortunately, being that type of person, I had kept every document, payslip, company communication and bulletin from that era. Scanning them and emailing in my documentary evidence produced the same old response.

Finally, I sent them paper copies of first and last payslips, letter of employment, a scan of my current passport and old security badge plus the single pension scheme report they had mailed to me a few years after I had left. All by recorded delivery.

This produced a result! They have now "granted" me a pension pot worth some £90k. Money I would never have been able to prove I was due, if I hadn't kept a fat folder of all my paperwork.

Moral: never throw anything away.

[anothercynic]

Re: Proof of pension

When it comes to anything employment-wise with financial implications (like pensions), absolutely do not throw anything out. It is so utterly important. Same goes for things like proof of residency (for those who come to a country on a work permit or similar and then need to prove residency etc for citizenship or similar).

Those countless people caught up in the Windrush scandal ended up getting shafted by the government because the government had no proof (thanks to the initiator of the hostile environment policy at the Home Office, Theresa bloody May, ordering the landing cards shredded because "no one needs that stuff anymore"), and none of these folks who arrived on these shores during the Windrush times ever got, or got given, proof that they were considered citizens under the Immigration Act in force at the time, and none were paranoid enough (and seriously, who at such a time ever thinks that their own (post-)colonial government would shaft them thoroughly 60 years later!) to make sure they had paperwork for that until the smelly brown stuff hit the rapidly rotating blades of metal.

That's why I will give the Germans credit that they have a so-called "Lebensbuch" in which *everything* is kept... birth certificate, certificate of baptism (!!), initial ID document, every renewed ID document after, certificate of starting school, certificate of changing/leaving school(s), every grade at every end of the school year, college year, uni year, certificates of graduation, certificates of certification (for work), marriage/divorce/remarriage certificates, death certificates (if a spouse passed away), etc etc etc. It adds up and ends up being something like 5 or 10 boxes worth of crap that you schlep with you everywhere you move, but should there *ever* be a question of "did you really do/have this", you go up into the attic/down into the cellar and dig up the proof that yes, indeed, you really did/have said thing.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Proof of pension

> It adds up and ends up being something like 5 or 10 boxes worth of crap that you schlep with you everywhere you move,

Do the Germans have a word for "computer" ?

I understand that they can store upto several pages of text these days

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Proof of pension

Which doesn't help if the jobsworths want the original documents.

[anothercynic]

Re: Proof of pension

And boy do they like to see the originals. Or copies, certified by specific authorities (like notaries).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Proof of pension

I believe IBM have, uhh, some considerable experience of helping Germany keep track of data relating to its citizens… :-(

(Just one reason - and the Ossies have an additional reason, of course - why German people have a fairly healthy suspicion of large centralised record-gathering systems.)

You can see why you having your own records in a box might be the preferable option.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Proof of pension

"Do the Germans have a word for "computer" ?"

Official documents have seals and many have anti-tampering and anti-counterfeiting features. It's not a bad idea to scan and store documents on your computer and maybe keep a photo of your passport on your phone, but that won't eliminate the need to produce the official document when required.

I need to get the death certificate for somebody (long story) and the county requires an appointment to visit the office to be allowed to pay the fee and get it. I don't need it so urgently that I'll drive 150 miles round trip, but if I did, I would have to do that and after waiting a couple of days for an appointment. It many also be a hour or more of waiting once there. If you needed official documents from several different government offices, that could be several days. You have to hope that what you need them for is not too urgent. In the US, you have to worry that the government offices aren't shut due to budget impasses.

My box count is 2. I could thin that out if I wanted. There is no requirement at my age to show my school graduation stuff. As I have a couple of college degrees, there's no question or concern about having graduated from high school. The 4th grade report cards from Ms Ball are only sentimental as she was a favorite teacher. I only keep my latest long form resume on paper. It's on the computer, but if that rises up in smoke, it makes it easy to use the paper copy to type it all back in without having to look up dates.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Proof of pension

"absolutely do not throw anything out."

I have all of my "papers". School report cards, college/uni grades, old driving licenses, old passports, etc. I keep my old tax filings and those will have W-2's and 1099's that I have received. It's two boxes now that I'm old and the second box has been started recently (more bloody paperwork. so much for the digital age). My work journals are digital in a basic text format since they are unlikely to be needed, but there is no reason to throw them away.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Proof of pension

"Moral: never throw anything away."

Another take away is if you have a chance to save for your own retirement, you won't have these sorts of issues. Those savings might even be accessible before you hit a certain age if you don't block yourself up. You don't get to recoup the tax savings if you don't get to the finish line or crawl over and all that retirement money is going to you care until its exhausted.

[Dvon of Edzore]

I hadn't retired, but the computer was an Apple ///.

A customer of the shop where I was the most senior employee was still using an Apple /// in their professional practice. Data conversion costs kept him locked in, and Apple had effectively bricked up the door by refusing to produce a newer model. Thus for several years I got to make a 300-mile round trip as an independent consultant for preventive, percussive, and just-plain-cussive maintenance, so the fraying rope he was dangling from could stretch just a bit longer. I was independent as in "the Secretary will disavow any knowledge" since the shop could not possibly guarantee an old box that might randomly go toes-up with parts unobtainable, leaving only the hired legal teams happy. Eventually the situation ended with him paying one of his staff to type the important stuff into a more mainstream application.

It was a pleasant drive, and the family got to eat in a different branch of the same chain restaurant, so no complaints.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: I hadn't retired, but the computer was an Apple ///.

"preventive, percussive, and just-plain-cussive maintenance"

Well put.

[MachDiamond]

Re: I hadn't retired, but the computer was an Apple ///.

"Eventually the situation ended with him paying one of his staff to type the important stuff into a more mainstream application."

I've had a similar thing happen and wound up using both the old and a new system for some time before deleting the old all together. Once I was at the point where I didn't need anything from the old system, it could be retired after printing important things to stick in a filing cabinet. That made me not be tempted to keep stretching the old system so far. There's often a migration path for things at the beginning that won't work later on. The only way to make it work is to have every intervening version and upgrade files one step at a time.

[ATrickett]

1st class flights

I know someone who retired but got hauled back to do something apparently only he could do.

Rather than deal with the evil French tax authorities he agreed to do the work for free as long as the flights were all first class and the accommodation was equally good. He racked up a lot of airmiles going between France and China for free for a year or so. He (and colleagues) had even a guided tour of the terracotta army by the museum director while it was closed to the public...

[CountCadaver]

Re: 1st class flights

Whereas HMRC/DWP would cite "items received in lieu of pay" and cite flights, accommodation etc and then bill you for the (assumed and worst case scenario) value of them. It will only get worse with encroaching powers to gain access to bank accounts, next will be email providers etc....

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 1st class flights

When I worked in France I would often tag a few days on the end of business trips to take vacation somewhere different. Sometimes I'd bring my wife out (at my expense, of course) to share the trip (and hotel). No-one officially cared.

A German colleague who often accompanied me was very annoyed that he couldn't do the same. The German tax authorities would insist on an itemised breakdown of the trip to work out what percentage of the flight and hotel costs were for personal use, so he could be appropriately taxed. It was so complex that the company simply banned German staff from adding any personal travel into business trips

[Korev]

Re: 1st class flights

I used to have to travel to American Boston, it was cheaper for the company to fly me out on Saturday and to pay for the hotel and meals than to go on the Sunday. Trebles all round!

[Unoriginal Handle]

Re: 1st class flights

Indeed, I've used the same tactic. Open jaw flights and a Saturday reduced the cost to the company and ended up with me having road trips to/from the sales kick off location, mostly via Yosemite and Death Valley, or on one occasion, Vegas -> Zion -> Moab -> Denver through the Rockies. 1100 miles in 4ish days in a convertible Mustang, paid for by not having to pay for flights.

One year, the company mandated out Sunday back Thursday for everyone in Europe. Hence the doubling or more of the flights bill. Next year there was a more relaxed attitude and as long as you were at SKO for the right days and it was cheaper for the firm, not a problem.

[anothercynic]

Re: 1st class flights

Ironically this is very similar to what I have to deal with here. Whereas people used to tack on a few personal days to a business trip (like for a conference) and the company paid for the flight and the accommodation during the business part, now that's no longer allowed because of said HMRC drama (in addition to 'tax implications of working internationally'). So now the question is how you can make things easier for yourself... fly on *your* dime (as you would've for a quick week trip to said location) and let the company pay for the hotel for the period of the work stay and you pay the rest, or just not tack on any days at all.

Things used to be so much easier a few years ago where it was clear that if the company paid less (as @Korev points out) if you flew over earlier (and stayed a Saturday night - which is often a condition on a cheap fare), they'd be happy to put you up for a day (especially if despite the extra day's hotel the combined cost was *still* less than it would've cost otherwise) and you'd go and have fun on your own dime.

But these days? God forbid. So the constant whinges about "please consider the financial costs of your trips and help us save money" fall on deaf ears here. If you insist I fly out on a Sunday despite Saturday being cheaper (or return a day or two later, for the same reason), then you know what, I tried to save you money by looking at the economics and you told me "no can do". So, which is it? Save you money or be inflexible? Inflexible it is, so, suck it!

[Korev]

Re: 1st class flights

It was actually my manager at the time who told me about that trick

[Scott 26]

Re: 1st class flights

> "please consider the financial costs of your trips and help us save money"

When I first discovered el Reg when I was working my OE in old London town a quarter of a centuary ago (really??? that long??? sheeeeeeeet). We were doing a rollover in Edinburgh. We had had a change in IT Director. Old director was ex-US Military but hada background in IT, so things had to documented to the nth degree and run precisely in sequence (within error bounds of IT projects). But at the end of the project he was generous at the bar... Plus he and I would laugh when our English colleagues kept talking about "routers" (pronounced 'rooters' which means something else to Kiwis and Yanks).

New director was English, but background in accounting (???? da fuck was he doing in IT then?).

Anyways, back to Scotland: things went wrong and we said we needed another day (Sunday) to fix. New director said "nope, not paying Sunday rates, come home as booked"), so project team came back to to London, then first thing Monday went back to Scotland... but of course to the ire of the workers in the office who found only half their kit had been swapped out to the new gear....

[ATrickett]

Re: 1st class flights

I can see them doing that, but his point was he had to go to China to do the work - that was where it had to be done, so it was an expense anyway. He worked for a very large French based multinational, and they sent people all over the world all the time on fancy flights and put them up in fancy hotels and not that I would say it, paid bribes everywhere and claimed those as expenses too...

The French tax authorities are probably as sneaky/nasty/competent as the UK ones, but I know he got away with it for a year and was very nervous about a random tax bill from the Republic who never chased him up. Plus it was a few years ago when travel budgets were a lot more generous than today... I flown super-economy - and bring your own sandwiches if I need to travel...

[DS999]

Re: 1st class flights

cite "items received in lieu of pay" and cite flights, accommodation etc and then bill you

They bill you for the difference between coach and first? Or bill you for the entire flight, as if the travel was some sort of perk despite the travel being required to reach the location where the work was to be performed?

Sounds like a big pain either way. I only flew overseas once for my consulting work - to the UK - and since I made my own arrangements I paid for business class tickets because if they were going to have me on a 7 hour flight I was going to be comfortable. When I turned in the invoice they questioned the cost, and I told them since it was last minute travel (I went when the equipment I was to get configured arrived on site) that was the cheapest available fare. That was a lie, of course, but they didn't know that and I'm not sure how they could have proven otherwise since I doubt you can ring up an airline "so on flight 123 on Tuesday the 8th was coach class completely full?"

[MachDiamond]

Re: 1st class flights

"Whereas HMRC/DWP would cite "items received in lieu of pay" and cite flights, accommodation etc and then bill you for the (assumed and worst case scenario) value of them. "

That's not impossible, but not probable. If their offices were booking and paying for flights, accommodations and meals, it would take some work from the tax bastards to pin those expenditures on you. The company could hand you a credit card for expenses that doesn't come back to your tax ID number. It would be prudent of them to assign a spending cap and disallow cash withdrawals. I've been at companies that did that to not have to deal with reimbursements. There was a strict policy about no personal purchases for which one would reimburse the company.

I might be happy to be paid in holidays and "merch" for some things. If the aerospace company that bought the firm I used to work for wanted me to travel to Florida, consult for a few days and hang around to watch the lander being sent to the moon, I'd be up for that being paid in-kind. I expect there would be all sorts of behind the scenes access I'd never get as a tourist.

[Old fella]

DIBOL

I recently worked at a system integration company that needed to extract data from a customer's legacy system.

Several companies before had tried and failed.

We got some sample data and these 'strange' schema definitions. No access to the source code.

Fortunately I worked at DEC in the 1980's and recognised it as DIBOL.

The data was stored in ISAM files with, overlayed record definitions and numbers stored as Zoned Decimal (The sign is stored in the rightmost digit with

a “p” through “y”).

The company didn't want to pay for a DIBOL compiler, so using lex/yacc I wrote a simple parser for the the schema definitions and managed to decode all the data files and extract it all as JSON.

Like the article, I can't remember where I left my glasses, but can remember code and techniques from 40 years ago.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: DIBOL … using lex/yacc

anyone using those tools (or flex/bison) today would be likely be out of retirement… I don't think that whole class of tools are dealt with outside of theoretical compsci classes nowadays; almost certainly not part of most developer's toolkit.

Lex/yacc would be a shoo-in for the fairly simple syntax (according to grokipedia) of Dibol and well within the capabilities of a lalr parser.

“p” through “y” stumped me until I realised 0b0111_0000 … 0b0111_1001 (0x70 … 0x79) although I must admit I never had to deal with bcd - floating point yes, bcd never; Although I am not sure I was the winner there - ieee 754 made thing a little better but there are still oceans of old data in other formats.

[andy the pessimist]

Re: DIBOL … using lex/yacc

I used flex/bison for one project as an initial, rather dirty solution.

I told my permie replacement only use if everything is broken. I doubt that they would understand it.

I am retired.

As a test engineer i tought myself how to use flex/bison for my amusement. My background is electronics not compsci.

[Daedalus]

Re: DIBOL

My first introduction to lex/yacc, and flex/bison, was in translating one CAD format file to another as part of a contract job. Apart from the mind-bending effect of using recursive BNF declarations, it proved to be so effective I went on to using it as a first resort in any remotely language-like application later. It didn't hurt that I'd been introduced to finite-state automatons earlier.

Long story short, somewhere out there, some translators for a medical device information protocol called LIS2A2 are, or more likely, were, chugging away while the competition, mired in C or C++ or even (really?) Pascal, were tossing out error after error.

And my thanks for all this? "It's too strict".

The protocol was well documented (although it's one of those non-standard standards, with lots of options for doing it "your way") and as far as I was concerned, it was easier for them to play by the rules than for me to add endless exceptions.

And no, I wouldn't dream of getting involved again, for any price. Software engineering is so much easier than people engineering.

Mine's a Sam Adams Boston Lager

[trevorde]

The Luxury of Money

My brother worked in a government department and had a major role in their digital transformation. He did all the specification, most of the testing and signoff. After 36 years, he retired in relative financial comfort. After about 6 months, his old department contacted him to see if he wanted to work on an extension to the digitisation. He thought of a very high hourly rate and then doubled it. There was an audible gasp, some awkward silence and a "We'll get back to you on that one" response. After a week they called him and said "Can you start on Monday?". My brother thought about how much he was enjoying retirement and didn't really need the extra money anyway, before responding "Thanks but no thanks".

[Anonymous Coward]

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day!

Brought anything good to your fellow sysadmins today? I brought in some cookies from a nearby bakery; a co-worker brought some excellent sweet-stuffed croissants from a different bakery.

Last week we had a user bring us muffin shots - a chocolate muffin soaked in a shot of espresso, topped with whipped cream. Much appreciated.

[anothercynic]

Re: Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day!

Wow. You have nice users! It'd be nice if my colleague and I were shown some appreciation like that. But since we work from home and no-one knows really that we exist (unless the brown smelly stuff hits the rapidly rotating metal blades), the chances of us ever being spoiled like that are less-than-slim to none.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day!

A real BofH would assume that the appearance of free baked goods were a trick to lure them out of mission control in order to let electricians/auditors/4 horsemen of the apocalypse/managers in

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day!

Happy saad. That about sums things up...

--> for all those still struggling in the trenches.

[Giles C]

Not quite the same (not retired yet)

I left Bgl group about 8 years ago, having worked there as a network admin for 20 years.

Since then (although these stopped about 5 years ago), I have been asked for….

The combination to the data tape safe (seriously)

Did I know where xxx was - this was 6 months after I left.

And the best one, where did the cable for the gps clock antenna run as they are doing some building work and it has stopped working….

I also found that a year after I had left I still had admin access to their Ripe account and could have changed any of the settings.

[David 132]

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

I was laid off from a large semiconductor company about 3 years ago. A year after that, my phone rang, and when I answered and identified myself, an exasperated voice on the other end said "David132, we're moving out of your building at the end of the month so you really do need to move the contents of your cubicle to your new location."

When I explained that I had, at that point, been an ex-employee for 12 months there was a very embarrassed silence, followed by a chastened "Oh. Well. Um. Sorry. I'll update the records."

I am still not sure whether to feel anger that (at least one part of) the company hadn't noticed my absence for 12 months, or pride that they had apparently kept my cubicle intact and preserved as a shrine to my greatness for all that time :)

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

Were they still paying you ? Or had they "uh, we fixed the glitch " ?

[David 132]

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

Ah, that would have been nice, but alas no. At that point I was living solely off my redundancy payout, which was being spent at a frightening rate on canine chemotherapy (it's a long story).

[Lee D]

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

The last place I left, I had trained up the only other IT guy there for nearly a decade to the point that he could take it over.

I warned that place I was going if they didn't treat us better, they didn't care a bit.

I left, keeping them informed at EVERY stage of... quite literally the first job offer that came up. Interest, interview, offer, acceptance, notice period, everything that they should know. They couldn't care less.

They asked who would take over. Well... there's only one choice, isn't there? Because you wouldn't let me have a larger team despite have a dozen of your own consultants and audits telling you that it was necessary. It would be the guy I trained up.

I warned them that he would also leave unless they treated him better. They didn't care.

So I left. They had a quick panic but by that time I had no interest (tried to "lure" me back with 2% raise... I'd already told them that the other was offering +20%, and 2% wasn't a raise, it was an insult).

The other guy took over. They suddenly realised that they SHOULD have someone else on the team, hired a complete idiot for him to manage while he tried to run the place on his own... that was worth than anything else.

Now, we had documented EVERYTHING. It was one of the things that the audits loved. Everything was written down. But nobody cared.

That other guy... he left a year or so later, tired of being the scapegoat for everything, not getting any further raises, being paid far less than I had been, and having to deal with an employee who was basically NEVER there and wasn't any use when he was. He got a far better job elsewhere, again almost immediately he looked.

So they hired out again. He asked to be involved in the hiring process, they refused. They finally relented when they realised that they didn't know HOW to hire someone who could do the job. He helped out and put in a firm recommendation for some candidates and a firm recommendation AGAINST one particular one. Guess which one they hired?

He warned them again, he warned them again when that guy started, he warned them that he had no clue and was actively breaking systems... they didn't care.

As my friend walked out the door (the 2nd in his position in as many years!), he watched the new guy delete the documentation VM, stop all the critical access control services, remove all the notes on that machine NOT to stop those services, all the funny hoops you have to jump through to restart them (notes I'd written and which I doubt I could remember myself without those notes!) etc. etc. Literally as my friend left on his last day, the doors locked and he couldn't get out because of what the guy did (fortunately, he and I installed that system, so he knew a bypass, and walked out... every door flashing like mad as it lost connection to the system...).

This was a Friday. The very next day, he's getting a barrage of calls. He ignores them all weekend. Monday morning our old workplace call him at his new job. Absolutely nobody can get access to the site. They're all locked you. "You have a new guy now... I handed everything over to them... I explained every system... I left copious notes and documentation... it's his problem."

In the end, he went back for ONE DAY at stupendous rates and - the guy had basically destroyed everything. The access control system was trashed and my friend restored from one of our backups. The servers were turned off for no reason. Anything the new guy didn't understand or like, he'd deleted... including the backups... Even the helpdesk - he'd trashed it and replaced it with some ad-based online shareware junk without telling anyone and now everyone had ads popping up on their computers, prompting numerous complaints. Everything was deleted, damaged, turned off or replaced with something that didn't work.

My friend and I both got calls, texts, messages, over the next year or so from various people there - a new IT director, the estates manager, etc. etc. ... my friend got them all the time, me not so regularly because I think they were utterly embarrassed at having to go that far back - I hadn't worked for them for 2 years by that point. We never answered them. They still try occasionally.

I wouldn't like to think what state their systems are in now.

[Excused Boots]

Re: Not quite the same (not retired yet)

"I wouldn't like to think what state their systems are in now.”

Very probably the company is no longer in business.

[Anonymous Coward]

not retired, but...

Not a retirement story (yet), but close. At my previous job, I wrote a custom planning tool that mined the raw database underlying Sage to bounce planning against inventory and pending POs.

This was a quick hack to act as a stopgap for 6-12 months while we rolled out a more suitable ERP system. (Quiet, you, I hear you alll laughing at your screens!).

I left the company about 3 years later, in part because I could see that I was being set up to take the fall for our aborted ERP rollout.

About five years after that, I got a call from the new MSP that was supporting my old employer. My hack was still in regular use, but wasn't happy after a server migration. I had hard coded either a filepath or a server name, I think (probably server name, because if we ever move things around, I'll just update the DNS entry for the accounting server, right?).

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: not retired, but...

... This was a quick hack to act as a stopgap ....

The dictionary definition of a legacy system that will outlive your grandchildren

[Giles C]

Re: not retired, but...

Classic quote but true

Their is nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.

After spending the last week attempting to unravel how the routing works in the main campus, I have a diagram that to be readable would need to printed on A0 paper, and still can’t work out how some of the routes appear to work it has both BGP and OSPF but no redistribution between protocols and a good scattering of random static routes as well.

But it does function - now I have to work out how to move everything to one protocol without breaking anything.

[H in The Hague]

Control systems too

A few years ago I visited a customer site where they were doing scheduled maintenance on a blast furnace.

They were also replacing the blast furnace control system so an elderly American gentleman had come out of retirement, again. Apparently he was one of the few people around who really knew the old control system inside out. By that the time new control system had been running in parallel with the old one for a year for test purposes.

Impressive operation: thousands of contractors on site, large storage areas where steel slabs were stacked up so they could still supply steel during the shutdown, costs I think well over 10 million per day. To save a few days, instead of removing the crust at the bottom of the blast furnace with hydraulic hammers this time they simply used explosives. To start the rebuilt furnace up they built a crib of railway sleepers at the bottom and then covered that with several metres of old wooden pallets, etc. they been saving up for years. Eventually they collected fire from the other blast furnace which was still running and carried it to the new one to light it, while singing a traditional song. (Spoiler alert: by that time the hot blast from the other furnace had already lit it.)

My host commented that they were documenting everything meticulously as the next shutdown would be in at least 10, preferably 15 years, by which time he would have retired,

[David 132]

Re: Control systems too

"while singing a traditional song"

I know it's now 30+ years old, but I'd never thought of the Prodigy's Firestarter as "traditional"...

[Boris the Cockroach]

Re: Control systems too

You'll find that a lot of workers among the more dangerous occupations are extremely superstitious and that song is sung to scare away malevolent spirits that could cause harm to the workers. ever seen a slag explosion? eeekekkk

Even down among the safer (laughs) occupations, people go through a set routine everytime they come in or wear certain items, after all if you survive 5lb of steel spinning out of a machine at 100 mph due to your incompetence, you'll need all the luck you can to survive the encounter with our BoFH afterwards.......

<<<thinking of renaming the window in my office "highway to hell"

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Control systems too

A stroy about some famous scientist having a lucky horseshoe or similar in their lab.

"Surely Prof xxx, you don't believe in such ridiculous superstition"

"No of course not, but I'm told the luck still works even if you don't believe in it"

[G.Y.]

Re: Control systems too

Niels Bohr

[A_Tester]

Re: Control systems too

Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "I am the god of Hellfire!........and I bring you......FIRE!"

[David 132]

Re: Control systems too

With due credit to Sir Pterry..

The first criminal was "Fingers" Mazda, who stole Fire* from the gods.

*He had to fence it. It was too hot†.

†He really got burned on that deal.

[A_Tester]

Re: Control systems too

Crazy World of Arthur Brown - "I am the god of Hellfire and I bring you!.......FIRE....." --->

[Marty McFly]

Reminds me of the parable...

Big giant project, trying to preserve as much of the original work as possible. Fixing some sort of old work where the original team had long since retired. They needed expertise on where to drill the hole to do the stuff.

They find the original designer, long in to retirement. They beg him to come back and help them figure out the problem.

The guy shows up with a piece of chalk, and marks an X on the wall and says to make the hole right here. They do and everything works out perfectly.

He submits them a bill for $10,000. The company complains because he spent so little time on-site, it was hardly worth it. They demand an itemized bill, which was promptly delivered:

$1 - one piece of chalk

$9,999 - knowing where to drill the hole

The invoice was promptly paid.

Story telling aside. There is some truth here to remember the next time management has a hankering to clean out the old guard. Frankly it is a relatively new problem to our industry and is only going to get worse. The original pioneers of the 50's-70's are pretty much done. GenX are most of the old guys now. This is NOT a skills assessment against any of the Millennials, but their technical focus is forward in to modern coding and development. Fewer & fewer people know how to work with the basic assembly language and binary coding that used to be table stakes for any qualified programmer.

I wonder if someday we will reach a point where we will forget how fundamental things like chips work and we will just keep churning out Moore of the same with no further innovation.

(Yes, I meant to write that).

[ExampleOne]

Re: Reminds me of the parable...

“We will just ask Claude”

On a serious and less bitter level, the path forwards is clear, and there is a very noticeable drop in the quality of those coming into the workforces where “AI skills” are predominating over ability to think.

There is also a very obvious gap if you are looking for traditional Linux system administrators: 20+ years experience seniors? Yes, can find them. Fresh out of college juniors? They are there. 5-10 years experience? Almost nonexistent.

[Sherrie Ludwig]

Re: Reminds me of the parable...

Fewer & fewer people know how to work with the basic assembly language and binary coding that used to be table stakes for any qualified programmer

My 70+ year old husband is working on a "six month project" for a company that bought the mainframe program he supported pre retirement. The six months is now 2+ years. He isn't complaining, the commute is a two meter shuffle.to the next room, the pay is nice even though the (US) quarterly return and estimated tax payments are a pain, and he enjoys his colleagues, albeit he has only met most of them by phone. And it keeps his assembler coding skills sharp

[mcswell]

Data Retention

The problem is data (or in the case of the article, program code---but that really is a type of data) retention. It is a huge issue that almost no one pays attention to.

My introduction to this problem was when I worked at a university (which shall remain nameless) lab, and had to pull up some old code that someone had written eight or ten years before. I didn't even know what programming language it was written in, so `find . -type f -exec grep -H <something> {} \;` wasn't up to the task, since I didn't know what <something> was. After looking in all the logical places, I went to the head programmer. "Oh, it's in ___ directory" he said, rattling off a several directory level deep path. And it was.

Did he retire? No, but while riding his bicycle to work one day, he was hit by a bus (ok, a car...). Fortunately he wasn't killed, but he was in the hospital for awhile.

You had better believe that in my next job (another university lab) I loudly and frequently stood on the soap box telling everyone who would listen about the need to document where data and code lived, and to put that documentation in some permanent place. The problem wasn't retirees (I was eventually one of the first) or people getting hit by buses, but rather people leaving for other jobs, taking with them the knowledge of where stuff lived. And over the 17 or so years I worked there, we had no less than a dozen cases where we needed to resurrect program data or code. Once it was because the organization we wrote it for lost their copy(!), another time it was because of a threat to sue (the results of our evaluation had made their software look bad).

Now I'm retired, and while only in my dreams have I been called in, I have this suspicion that things have gone missing.

[Tim99]

I'm old

I volunteer as a technical assessor for a national ISO accreditation authority. I did an on-site job for them this week. One of the assessed remarked on how good my memory was, as I recalled a procedure from 40 years ago as part of the assessment. I had to tell them "OK, but I have no recollection of what I cooked for dinner 2 days ago"...

[PB90210]

Re: I'm old

"why am I leaving this room?"

[Sproggit]

Life Imitating Art?

Isn't this basically the back-story for the character "Wally", from "Dilbert", by Scott Adams?

[Bitsminer]

"Lured"

I was lured out of retirement twice.

The first time my $EX_EMPLOYER wanted a training course on how to interview and hire candidates. Trained some former colleagues on how I had hired them, and why! That was fun.

The second time was more serious.

Bid Manager: Hey can you help out on a bid? We need someone to work out the cost of the hardware.

Me: Maybe. What is the schedule?

Bid Manager: We need the costing in two weeks.

Me: And how much work or effort do you thing it is?

Bid Manager: About three weeks.

Me: Ha ha ha ha ha!

[khawar]

Was asked recently to teach solaris ( Unix ). Started digging through old stuff. Had coincidentally dumped an old solaris CD/DVD into the trash a few days ago in a cleanup drive to reduce old junk.

They did not follow up so I was thankful I can keep moving on with Linux.

Learned about harmony OS a few days ago become a separate OS to linux. Shall be working on the multiplatform development for iOS, android and harmony so as to reduce programmer time.

[redpola]

Isn’t this the whole of the COBOL industry?

[chozorho]

God forbid companies do on-the-job training so that knowledge isn't lost...! No, that would make wayyy too much sense.

[David Hicklin]

But that would mean employing two people to do the same job!

[Lee D]

It's like the old resiliency/redundancy argument.

"But we're paying for an entire server, specced powerfully enough to run the company, to sit and do nothing most of the time!"

"Yes."

[Nifty]

"Roger told us that as he worked on the project, he realized the income would complicate his own tax affairs"

Not even worth earning with a part time gig after retirement? Sounds like the UK's tax incentives!