Or they, like many non-technical organizations, have no idea how to hire programmers. Could be worth a shot; even at regular companies they often over-state resume requirements.

As someone who works with a lot of state IT people, if they don't know how to hire programmers, they probably don't know how to manage programmers. In a bureaucracy, if the administrators are making these kinds of unrealistic hiring demands in a crisis, it probably means that the administrators outrank all programmers and don't trust them to make their own decisions. This is not an environment to work in.

This is a crisis, not a normal time. Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

Problem is, that's how they get away with everything.

They fix nothing, then wait for somebody to need them enough, or have compassion enough to handle their mess.

Basically here, they are saying: we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back. We didn't think technical debt was a thing. It has always worked. And it's virtual. And IT is always exaggerating anyway.

Now it does bite them back, and do they take responsibility ?

No. They ask for competent people to have mercy and save the day because the situation is dire. Because this is special this time, unlike the other times.

This is completely not like with the health care system that never got fixed and now the medical personal is paying for it so that the people don't suffer as much from this mismanagement.

They will not pay more. They will no fix anything. They will not respect you more, change the way things are done, or take any responsibility for this. And in fact they will probably guilt trip you into give up your health to overwork on this with less resources and for less pay because it's an emergency.

A friend of mine works in an hospital right now. She has been at work for 15 days straight. They already told her she won't get paid for the days she was not supposed to work but did.

Then as a final fuck you, if this turns out ok, if the catastrophe is avoided, they will get the reward.

The nurses or the programmers ? They will be forgotten in a week. Nothing will change.

But for the mismanagers, their superior will thank them for managing this situation well. They may even get promoted and have more responsibility.

So you have the choice between saving the money of poor people now and reinforcing the suck of the whole system, of letting people suffer for a chance of a redo and purging the ones that lead to this.

This is a terrible choice to have to make.

Especially since we have the empathy to make us discuss this, while clearly they don't.

This is honestly a terrible take. NJ did try to modernize the benefits system in 2007, awarding the contract to a company that is now owned by HP. News article: https://www.nj.com/politics/2014/11/nj_ends_118_million_cont...

EDIT: surprised at the downvotes. Parent asserted:

> we didn't listen to all those competent people that told us we should have cleaned this system a long time ago because one day it will bite us back.

And the historical record showed that NJ made that realization at least before 2007 (which is when the contract was awarded)

No, it's not. These state IT systems and this habit that leads to their inevitable downfall needs to die.

They respect nothing. Scope? No, we need to fulfill every need and some. Budget? No, of course we don't have cash, and we have to be very careful, it's the taxpayers' money! Time? It's already late! (Yet they weren't able to get it done in 10+ years.)

They have no real competency, they don't even have competency to delegate this to someone competent. And they lack the competency to manage their own inconsistency regarding these issues.

The linked tweet thread is a perfect example of this. (Rampant project mismanagement; too big to fail; they introduced some Hadoop scoring system to match inconsistent records and whatnot instead of simply throwing out all the bad data and handing the rest separately - eg hiring a bunch of unemployed people to go over them.)

A state that should be at the top of any kind of project management and procurement hierarchies wasn't able to supervise an IT system project. It's so incompetent just thinking about it will lead to spontaneous combustion.

Yup. Exactly right. And they think the 26 year old outside consultant knows how to fix the problem better than the 50 year old government programmer, who management has spent 17 years beating down their self respect.

Consistently assigning work to big firms who consistently screw up... All they want to do is show that "they're trying", and the charade will continue until someone does get fired for buying IBN.

I bet NJ wouldn’t accept any excuses from a small business that tried to claim “they’re trying” if they had technical issues with payroll.

Surely outsourced and offshored isn't something to praise them for

Like off-shored protective medical gear, off-shored pharmaceuticals manufacturing, and now a country full of unskilled 20 somethings that can only do phone apps and coffee baristas.

Companies will not like it, consumers will not like it, State budgets will not like it,

But like cobol programmers, we need to learn how to make things and build our own supply chain.

My old employer did not listen last year when I retired. Nobody was assigned to make an annual change to a REXX program. I learned it on my own because it predated me. But the process was so rigorous because we had to be our own RACF Admin to make our own RACF I’d to get to the datasets to change, then run the programs, but they got rid of printers connected to the mainframe and tighter up FTP so much that if took days to refresh passwords and ftp print files to your pc hard drive. Then run programs in C# that scalped off the first column and read the mainframe page skips....

Am I was suppose to teach this to a C# programmer who would not need to run this for 6 more months. I blame management. They loved outside consultants and treated our own programmers like loading dock employees, write ups when 5 minutes late for work.

They wanted me to take a brand new high end pc with me when I retired. I left it on my desk when I left. They had 6 months to learn it.

Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

> Given a choice between the government doing it and a company that has been specializing in this type of thing for decades, why wasn’t this the best choice?

Because the only thing they are specialized in is sucking tax money from the government.

> It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

That's their only pedigree. In other countries they also took a lot of money and delivered crap. So people should be aware by now. But with all this corr^W lobby ...

Getting Atlas Shrugged vibes. Lots of parallels with this situation actually.

Seems like OP is describing the plight of the average worker who gets left to clean up the mess with no credit at the end of it all and less of the business leaders or executives.

IIRC, the capable workers were the first gone to Galt's Gulch. The story dwells on slightly-less-bad business people running around like decapitated chickens trying to keep things working, but the real heroes just quietly noped out.

> So you have the choice between saving the money of poor people now and reinforcing the suck of the whole system, of letting people suffer for a chance of a redo and purging the ones that lead to this.

What a terribly wrong take. If you really believe the system is that corrupted, and that horrible then you know darn well that the count of people who suffered during this emergency won't make a difference. There will be "accountability" in some form, but it won't be driven by how many people did or didn't get money for food at all.

Whether you help them or not won't change the system. So instead you're saying scores of families should go hungry so you can stay on your high horse and lecture.

That's a good reason. You don't need a moral reason to not choose a paid job. The reason scores of families will go hungry because of the mismanagement, not because one human did not step up to keep the mess rolling. In analogy, the reason Africa is starving is because of the past and present extreme exploitation from foreign powers, and said foreign powers sponsored corruption and violence. Not because "a heartless middle class salary man did not send his monthly 10 dollars", turning a blind eye to the real causes of the situation.

The big corporations, will get $18,000 from every taxpayer from their future tax dollar.

But they struggle just to give each worker in this country $1200.

It is hush money. Then next year they will tell us it is taxable income. Watch.

Yes, don't forget there will also be some deniers calling it a fraud afterwards: https://twitter.com/TheKouk/status/1211123181051768832

> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

In absolute terms, perhaps. But if you are moving away from taking jobs out of self interest, and into doing something for the public good; you might as well check out https://80000hours.org/ and pick the job that has the most positive impact.

My guess is that working any kind of 'normal' programmer job and giving 10% of your income to an effective charity would beat out enduring the bad boss in New Jersey.

10% of my salary wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as helping millions of people get unemployment checks quickly.

You'd have to look at the marginal impacts.

You working for them would most likely not push them from failure to success. It would perhaps make success marginally more likely, or perhaps decrease schedule overruns slightly. Or perhaps make not much of a difference at all, depending on how screwed they are.

Of course, the estimate of impact also depends on how you value humans. If you value all humans fairly equally, then Americans who had a job until fairly recently (ie those eligible for unemployment insurance) are already fairly well off compared to the people who benefit from more malaria nets. Especially since their unemployment benefits would merely be delayed, not lost.

Lots of people value those closer to them higher. The most prominent example are family and friends. But valuing compatriots higher is fairly common as well.

Of course, you can give more than 10% of your income as well.

Would do it myself. For free because of the unemployed. But I see no link to who is hiring, not going thru a head hunter who takes a rake, and states cannot send you a firewall link and password without a month or more of red tape. And rightly so if it is a payroll system, the opening it would make for abuse.

Then why don't _you_ do it ?

I didn’t say I would do either. It is a generic discussion about tradeoffs.

Did you apply? I think it would be interesting to hear the story of what it looks like inside if you decide to work with them.

There's a difference between a generic "bad boss" and an incompetent one. An incompetent one will kill the project.

If NJ have failed to maintain legacy systems that good COBOL development needs, almost by definition they have incompetent management (and a Governor who can't even pronounce COBOL). They likely don't have the dev or test boxes that they should have. They will either put up barriers to the other systems the developer needs to understand, or will throw open the doors so that my fixes get broken by everyone else's fixes.

> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing.

Let them get nothing. Then they'll call for the heads of the governors, the very people who couldn't care less about the system until it stopped working. They are the ones who could have made a difference but actively chose not to because it just wasn't that important to them.

> That's worth enduring a bad boss for.

A bad boss will absolutely give you burnout, and that lasts for years. You are of course correct, but at the same time I would never ask this of someone and I wouldn't subject myself to it either. Bad bosses will destroy your quality of life in the medium-long term.

This would work if we had only one problem to solve. Real people getting unemployment checks is an important problem for sure, but not the only one.

It's better to direct our limited resources to better porjects with a higher success rate and/or impact.

No. It is worth holding the bad boss accountable and firing the bad boss who put them in this situation in the first place.

They'll change their tune when they won't be able to find anyone. The free market is as honest as it gets. If you underpay and undertreat your employees, they will seek an alternative. It is simple opportunity cost.

It will probably not be all or nothing.

They'll probably find a few people who will give it a go. The result will probably be delays and failure. Business as usual.

I would normally agree, but emergencies can create opportunities for improvements in the process. See healthcare.gov for example.

"Chaos is a ladder" though it didn't turn out so well for that fictional character, his assessment wasn't wrong.

Yes, they hired a 24 year old college grad into personnel and she/he copied some old specs used by companies that wanted to bring in H1b programmers from off-shore.

The job specs were 40 lines long and pay was $60,000 a year for 10 years experience.

Then there were the places that brought in consultants that were doing a big rewrite, ignored the local staff and impressed management with their dark blue suits and white shirts, and left 6 years later without the project done. During that time the best of their own programmers left and they were left with the dregs and those a few years from retirement. Thought about doing this but I remember how we were treated. I left a job like that in Texas, worked in a shop in Connecticut with a room full of empty cubicles, and one very old guy and one new hire who knew Access.

Even the Director of MIS was being cut there but allowed to stay a few more months to apply for other jobs without saying he was unemployed.

I left.

Hell most technical organizations have no idea how to hire programmers.

Or maybe that’s their way of aiming high to land lower when that particular assortment of requirements isn’t yielding them any best-case options.

So what if they don’t know how to hire programmers? All they have to do is hire someone who has had engineering leadership role/experience and let them hire programmers, isn’t it?

Isn’t it easier to verify someone’s leadership credentials than COBOL skills?

Most government hiring does not work like that. "HR Specialists" decide if incoming applicants are qualified, and the hiring manager has little or nothing to do with it.

Lots of people are giving up before even trying.

States have done this to themselves. They can't expect people not to treat them warily just because they've suddenly discovered that their inattention to their own problems has consequences.

I can tick the 10+ years COBOL box nicely, though that was 30+ years ago and with that, somebody with 1-3 years COBOL would be more effective than somebody as myself.

Still, in an era of movie superheroes, who knew that having 10+ years upon your CV would enable you to go, step aside good citizens, for I shall save you. COBOL man to the rescue.

Or Cobol Woman! ;) Cobol was created by Admiral Grace Hopper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39

I am pretty sure that individual was referring to themselves with that term.

I was indeed, but still a very valid point and after all without Grace - there would be no COBOL.

I am pretty sure my intent was not to misgender him (else I wouldn't have said "Or"), but to point out that women can be Super Cobol Programmers too, and in fact the first Super Cobol Programmer was a woman.

If you're touchy about people gently correcting accidental unintended sexism, take a moment to think about how women like Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace have felt about being on the receiving end of systematic intentional sexism all their lives.

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

>If you're touchy about people gently correcting accidental unintended sexism

The point was that there is no sexism, unintended or otherwise, in the post you are "correcting". Projecting your touchiness onto others isn't very polite or constructive.

You are correct but the poster does raise fair and yes, nothing intended directly nor indirectly - however it would be possible to read that into it and the reply initially was fair and did restore balance for those that may mis-read and all done in the best possible taste - they used a geek-wink ";)".

However, it is easy to view such balance as over-balance and it can then snowball into something of which it was not, and words, like code - heck nobody writes perfect code first time, let alone wording. So you can easily get bugs, be that in the code or in how things are worded that open those words up to tangents or ambiguity that was never the intention.

Anyhow - we are all on the same page of that issue I do feel and with that, let's poor one out for Grace, who without her we would not even be having this conversation that COBOL has given us today.

I just vouched this after it just got flagged and as it is in response to myself that sent this path in motion and already been covered in this thread and no offence was meant or intended by myself of Don Hopkins, can we please read thru it all is cool.

We are all human after all and words are like code - bugs happen and we all operate our own unique brain-CPU's so things can and do run differently. No lines need to be read between here. Be well all and sorry, just thought I should clarify in the name of fairness for all and Don did nothing wrong in my eye's and it's all good.

>but to point out that women can be Super Cobol Programmers too, and in fact the first Super Cobol Programmer was a woman.

Well said and an extremly valid point upon many levels, let us not forget Grace.

I perhaps should of phrased it as COBOL Human, though that may of confused others more than not, more so with the mixed superheroes conversation and that in itself had legacy baggage as do many things that are easily tripped up upon.

I'd upvote you more as detail is as always important and should never be overlooked.

Unnecessary

Yes, but from my perspective - not unwelcome and I actually support the comment and took no misalignment or judgment from it - I'm all about balance and fairness - not that everytime the word man or women is used we have to then add lots of small print disclaimers. But it does remind us how some can read into things and reminds us to be more mindful of that aspect.

COBOL human to the rescue would of been better perhaps, so again unnecessary, yet not unwelcome and with that - everyone gets some karma.

Everytime I see COBOL, I always think of Newman from Jurassic Park and imagine that is a stereotypical COBOL programmer haha!

If you see any bosses with a weird scarf, back away cause they may spit corona-acid in your face!

Newman is some sort of Pascal programmer https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/28030/source-code...

That film's horrible misrepresentation of UNIX almost ruined it for me.

How exactly? Versus something like CSI, Jurassic Park got a lot of things right. The computers used were real SGI SPARCStations and they had a bunch of Thinking Machines CM-5s for gene sequencing in the background shots. I believe all of the on-screen shots were done with real Irix software (including the scene where they locked the doors, which was done using a real IRIX file manager called "fsn").

Sure it was given the Hollywood treatment, but it'd be pretty boring if they didn't.

Sun made SPARCstations, not SGI, who used MIPS, not SPARC, and just called them workstations. Then there was the SGI Indy, which was an SGI Indigo without the go. ;)

The 3d desktop file system navigator software running on the SGI workstation was actually a thing that SGI shipped, by Joel Sherrill <[email protected]>, called SGI Fusion, or FSN!

Original URL of binary distribution:

ftp://ftp.sgi.com/sgi/fsn/fsn.tar.Z

Now archived at:

ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/sgi/bin/fsn.tar.Z

https://github.com/jdm7dv/3d-file-system-navigator/blob/mast...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

>File System Navigator (fsn; pronounced "fusion") is an experimental application to view a file system in 3D, made by SGI for IRIX systems.

>Even though it was never developed to a fully functional file manager, it gained some fame after appearing in the movie Jurassic Park in 1993. In a scene in the film, the character Lex Murphy, played by Ariana Richards, finds a computer displaying the interface. She exclaims "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and proceeds to restart the building's access control system, locking the control room's doors. After the release of the film, some perceived the visualization as an example of media misrepresentation of computers, citing the computer game-like display as being an unrealistic Hollywood mockup.

FSN – the IRIX 3D file system tool from Jurassic Park

http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool...

SGI Fusion - FSN 3d File System Navigator

SGI File System Navigator, otherwise known as Fusion. Running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. If you have an SGI, a binary of this program is available at ftp.sgi.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ

It's a unix system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U

"Indigo without the go." -Mark Hughes (?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEcw_oTKTa0?t=6m8s

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341455

Software Usability II

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

My vivid memory is of that excruciatingly slow zoom into a bar graph representation of a directory, to which the girl exclaims, "this is UNIX! I know UNIX!". A real world UNIXer would go straight to a shell prompt, especially in a time crunch with Cretaceous predators at the door.

You have to go to the original Crichton novel for the real cringeworthy misrepresentation of tech: the "code" listings will make you weep. He's a great writer, don't get me wrong, but would a little bit of research and/or editorial assistance have hurt ?!

They aren't asking for so much. They want:

1. understanding the language (COBOL)

2. IBM mainframe experience (JCL, DB2, VSAM, SDLC)

3. credentialed (4-year degree)

Note that SDLC is a layer 2 network protocol in the SNA stack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_Data_Link_Control

3.) is what gets me...

Why do you need to pay a college to get a piece of paper to enable someone to pay you for skills you otherwise posses?

You say you have skills. Everybody says that. Prove it.

Assume the interviewer doesn't have time for a multi-day interview in which your skills are tested. Maybe the employer lost the last person with equivalent skills, so a non-technical interviewer is trying to find a replacement person.

>You say you have skills. Everybody says that. Prove it.

I feel like this is a game of chicken that FAANG can win, but NJ Unemployment Office (or whatever) cannot.

The shortage isn't really cash. You could hire some bright high school students for cheap, and, given enough time, and half-supervision by an experienced dev (who doesn't even know COBOL), they could fix whatever bugs are ailing the system. You could hire a couple (again, COBOL-ignorant!) web devs at or above market rate, and they could also deliver a working system. It would take time, but they could do it.

The actual shortage is management. They don't have anyone who'd be confident fixing things if said high school students screwed up. They don't have backups, or don't know how they work. It's unlikely they know what actually needs to be done.

So what they actually need is a tech lead. But they think they just need "programmers," so they advertise for programmers (with inflated requirements, because they need them to actually be a lead) and the pay is commensurate for "programmers," rather than what they actually need.

I am not saying I agree with this system, but am assuming one of the reasons is that the hiring company see the credentials as a way to not gamble on whether you "are familiar" with a subject or actually has deep knowledge of core concepts taught along a planned syllabus.

It makes no sense to me... JCL, DB2, VSAM -- ok. SDLC?

If it referred to SNA, it should be SNA/SDLC. Not referencing that (or VTAM) means Software Development Life Cycle.

Don’t be surprised if this position then goes to an H1B contractor though. If enough anericans who have this knowledge do not apply because they - Hate the tech - Can’t provide their feedback to improve the system - Don’t like the salary offered even if’s greater than their current unemployment income, then is it for an offshore company to come in and fill that gap.

I don't think the point is that Americans should consider themselves too good for the COBOL jobs. The point is that the organization has stated that it will refuse to hire many people who would be willing and able to do the jobs.

People love to attribute bad faith into a government just trying to get their shit together in the middle of an emergency. Where and when have they refused?

And that's why most American programmers hate H1B. It's not about filling jobs that we don't have the skill for, it's about filling jobs that companies don't want to spend money on. Offer a half mil a year, and watch how many qualified Americans come out of the woodwork.

This isn’t specific to programming. The whole point of hiring foreign is they do more work for less money and don’t complain (lest they lose their visa).

USA has the skill & unemployment to fill farming, construction, housekeeping, etc. jobs no problem. But why would companies pay 2X to hire an American that’s liable to quit at any point when they can get a foreign for X that’s legally bound to the work?

And that's why H1B is a sham. They should just auction off those visa slots to the highest bidders.

(The auction would also give politicians a nice incentive to find ways to increase the revenue received.)

Which popular H1B source countries teach COBOL? I feel like the advent of cheap offshore programming came well after the decline of COBOL. Though my sense of history can very well be off.

They can just lie about experience can they not?

I'm sure that Tata/Infosys/Cognizant will be happy to supply you with dozens of CVs claiming COBOL experience and then give crash courses to any candidates selected.

A lot of Indian degree courses teach COBOL for exactly this reason.

> JCL

  ERROR IN OR NEAR CARD 1 COLUMN 1
  0C7 ABEND
  ABORT
  CORE DUMP FOLLOWS:

....

About the only other thing I remember is:

  //SYSIN DD *

No. Thank. You.

If you get an S0C7, your JCL is probably fine (else you wouldn't get far enough to get a data exception).

JCL is just another scripting language. I found it fun. I did all the JCL for my group's production jobs and commented the hell out of the esoteric issues to help Operations triage things. A small, well-planned effort prevented a crapload of, well, crap.

> JCL is just another scripting language

One feature of JCL which I think is cool, is that whereas on Unix processes inherit file descriptors which are numeric only (and hence few applications know what to do with anything other than FDs 0-2), in JCL you instead have DDNAMEs which are 1 to 8 characters. I think, if Unix had alphabetic names for inherited streams rather than just numbers, you might see more Unix programs supporting more than three inherited streams.

Another feature I think is cool is catalogs. A database mapping dataset names (file paths basically) to the filesystem volume (disk or tape) on which the file lives. You can move a file to another disk or to tape without changing its name/path.

(Strictly speaking both of these are features of the MVS operating system as a whole, not just JCL per se, but JCL is one of the main interfaces to them.)

JCL is certainly not any worse than bash.

Like the other guy said, they're probably just listing their ideal candidate and not what the job may actually require

Or they are fulfilling Rhett requirement to post the job publications when they are rehiring a specific person quickly.

Just apply. There is no penalty for applying. If you want work, they definitely will at least talk to you.

Looks like they want a programmer to do the job of an entire IT department.

SDLC is often used to emphasize that you need to be familiar with the full "Software Development Lifecycle". When I read SDLC I just assume they mean, "you need to be able to take a project from concept to deployment (including documentation for supporting it long term)". Depending on org structures, a lot of engineers only work on one part of that pipeline throughout their career.

Nah, this is clearly an IBM mainframe shop. SDLC is a layer 2 network protocol in the SNA stack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_Data_Link_Control

> I did a few years in the salty COBOL mines

In the mid-80s, my first year CS professor anticipated most us ending up "in the lead mines of COBOL programming" — it was commonly assumed that we'd never manage to get rid of the dominance of COBOL.

Are references to mining common in the COBOL scene?

I can’t tell if you are joking, but “the salt mines” is a rather common bit of workplace humor, at least in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_mining#Idiomatic_use

Thanks! I genuinely was not aware of "salt mines" specifically, though I have come across mining references, and even made some myself, now that I think about it.

> I was sort of tempted to pursue this.

For me the exact opposite. 15 years ago I removed any and all reverence to my history of COBOL because I was suddenly actively being contacted for COBOL coding jobs.

Although I had a great time, as a starting coder, with COBOL jobs (transcoding COBOL to C at the time), I know one thing: ever ever again will I utter one like of COBOL code.

There are still people making very decent money doing it, but the lockin to one particular source of work just does not sound like what I could bare.

dont really know anything about this particular case, but:

Isn't it common for job applications like this to state what they "want", even if they know that it doesn't exist? (such as 3 years of experience with an 1 year old product).

Then they just hire the person who gets the closest to what they want.

4-year degree? So that rules out Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg.

To get serious, they need to move HR aside. Many of the best techs from the '70s and 80s dropped out of college. What was called for back then was real-world experience, not slips of paper.

I seem to spend most of my working life trying not to embarrass people with 4-year degrees who can't even spell things like "COBOL".

Do they mean that SDLC? Or do they mean "synchronous data link control"?

Nope - http://www.ambysoft.com/essays/agileLifecycle.html Though I would of prefered your flavour as way more fun and less admin work overheads.

And the very fact that you refer to "admin work overheads" in something claiming to be "agile" indicates that it's Agile(TM), not actual agile. (Though I got that idea very quickly from your link, as well...)

Yes, naming of projects was one of the most fun aspects in projects. Seen that play out in many ways, often case of thinking of what you wanted and working out some acronym or reason to go with that. One team the project manger was a fan of the TV show BILKO, so the new invoiceing system became called that once a passable acronym was worked out. Was something like Billing and Invoicing ...was so long ago but was clever and worked. Then their was the buzzword period and marketing departments, so would get whole rafts of things with Rapid as a prefix and the irony played out.

Still, maintenance is the biggest cost of any code that has lived so long, so with that such systems overall may well be agile, you just smooth out the pain over time in a more manageable way.