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A comment on The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore. Parent comment

Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by rubyfan on Sunday December 03, 2023 @03:02PM (#38510231)
> If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

This. Further, it’s a failure to continue to disincentivize roles that will support or port this business critical logic to something else. I worked at a large insurer where they slowly laid off mainframe talent over the last decade. Those mainframe salaries were counter to the narrative they were promoting around cloud being the future. Unfortunately in their haste to create optics they failed to migrate any of the actual code or systems from mainframe to cloud.

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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by credit_guy on Sunday December 03, 2023 @03:39PM (#38510542)
> it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

There are no absolute "management problems". Something that is a management problem when the effort required is 1000 man-years, may stop being so when it's only 100 man-days.

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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by hobs on Sunday December 03, 2023 @06:32PM (#38511912)
Given the decision would shrink a kingdom or put someone powerful out of a job it cannot be solved with AI making it easier.
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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by janalsncm on Sunday December 03, 2023 @07:00PM (#38512099)
That kingdom is shrinking already as people retire. Converting COBOL into Java means your kingdom can expand.
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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by sublinear on Monday December 04, 2023 @12:40AM (#38514071)
Management problems have a tendency to snowball and land on the next manager.

Higher authority doesn't understand it and the subjects don't care.

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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by rubyfan on Monday December 04, 2023 @07:02AM (#38516240)
I’m not convinced the proposed solution is that. This pitch has been around for a long time, before LLM it was some unnamed proprietary technology and after LLM it’ll be something new. The reality is this stuff is hard even when 80% can be automatically converted.
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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by GenerWork on Sunday December 03, 2023 @11:23PM (#38513728)
Did the remaining mainframers demand a higher salary to stay on, or did the insurance company have to hire outside contractors at exorbiant rates to migrate everything over?
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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by coldtea on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:48AM (#38514695)
>or did the insurance company have to hire outside contractors at exorbiant rates to migrate everything over

It would be appropriatingly ironic if some or all of those contractors were the same people previously fired.

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Re:The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore by rubyfan on Monday December 04, 2023 @06:27AM (#38515997)
Kind of the later I guess. Not much migrated really. When I left they were grappling with which major migration to do next, each to the tune of tens of millions each with no business benefit. In that industry there is momentum toward specialty tech platforms to save the day. Out of the frying pan into the fryer.
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