GRISTMILL FALLS, Ohio (CNM) -- Harold Snedeker retired from the Ohio Mutual insurance company in 1986, taking with him a gold watch and an intimate knowledge of 400,000 lines of COBOL he had written in the 1970s. This month, the company asked him to come back.
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| A mainframe date field, before and after the fix |
"They said, 'Harold, did you store the year as two digits?' and I said, 'Of course I did. Memory cost a fortune,'" said Snedeker, 71. "Then they asked how much I would charge to fix it. I told them. They said yes very quickly."
Recruiters say experienced mainframe programmers are commanding $150 an hour or more in the final weeks before January 1. Some companies have flown retirees in from Florida and Arizona, complete with spouses and golf clubs.
The work is tedious: searching for date fields, expanding them to four digits and testing the results. Snedeker works from a folding table in the company's basement next to a mainframe he describes as "an old friend who never learned to count past 99."
"The young people ask me why we did it this way," he said. "I tell them, 'We didn't think anyone would still be using this in 2000.' Then they look at the computer, and they look at me, and nobody says anything."
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