{"id":7808,"date":"2026-06-16T07:36:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T12:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/?p=7808"},"modified":"2026-06-16T07:36:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T12:36:20","slug":"route-fifty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/information-technology\/route-fifty\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last IBM Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I get the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.route-fifty.com\/?oref=rf-today-nl&amp;utm_source=Sailthru&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Route%20Fifty%20Today:%20June%2016%2C%202026&amp;utm_term=newsletter_rf_today\"><em>Route Fifty<\/em><\/a> morning email because that&#8217;s what is left of <em>Government Computing News<\/em> magazine. Don&#8217;t worry, you can&#8217;t find any reference to <em>Government Computing<\/em> magazine via Google. You see, <em>Government Computing News<\/em> magazine was the only media to publicly document the reason HealthCare.gov failed during its initial roll-out. Agile. All of the rest of the media simply quoted the peddlers of this fatal snake oil who all said it failed because it didn&#8217;t use Agile. The reporter for <em>Government Computing News<\/em> magazine had been walking around, talking with the developers actually working on the project during development. It was Agile and Agile is why it failed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Purveyors of this fatal snake oil called Agile have dutifully removed all information about this article and most information about <em>Government Computing News<\/em>. Even the link I had in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/information-technology\/iowa-caucus-2020-agiles-third-mega-failure\/\">this post<\/a> now points to a laundry list of gcn.com posts trumpeting Agile and AI. Trying to cover up the fact Agile spectacularly shit the bed. Most of what was GCN got rolled into <em>Route Fifty<\/em> and past Agile bed shitting stories have disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Today&#8217;s Email<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In today&#8217;s email there was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.route-fifty.com\/people\/2026\/06\/workforce-cliff-what-happens-when-last-ibm-i-engineer-retires-government\/414184\/?oref=rf-today-nl&amp;utm_source=Sailthru&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Route%20Fifty%20Today:%20June%2016%2C%202026&amp;utm_term=newsletter_rf_today\">an article with a click-bait headline about the last IBM engineer retiring from government<\/a>. It didn&#8217;t start off too bad. Gotta love it when non-geeks try to write about geeks. They initially stated the correct answer. Not in so many words, but stated it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Pay more. Train What you need.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No, trying to hire low wage Indians is not the solution. Running job opening ads wanting 15+ years experience in every technology IBM and\/or DEC ever produced offering less than half of market rate isn&#8217;t going to solve the issue either. If you keep dicking around those of us who know COBOL will all be dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">First They Claim Insecure<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Non-geeks really fail when they write about technology. Scrolling down in the article you can see that failure. First they claim these systems are insecure. Really? When you are running a system that almost nothing from the tiny x86 mind world <em>can<\/em> connect to because they don&#8217;t use the same character encoding, that&#8217;s pretty secure. IBM uses EBCDIC, not ASCII or UTF-8. Unisys systems use 7-bit ASCII and only run one job at a time. You can&#8217;t have a background virus or snooping program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">More on security to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Next They Claim Agile and DevOps Will End World Hunger<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Neither Agile nor DevOps have any place in Software Engineering. By definition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Engineering == Do it right the first time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We are talking about <em>professionally developed systems<\/em>, not AI. They used Waterfall SDLC for a reason. These are far reaching large architectural designs. Agile and DevOps are just hacking on the fly. These systems were well tested before rolling out. Many of them were written during the 1960s through 1970s. They got their Y2K problems fixed in 1999 and have been running ever since. Unless the laws change, these systems don&#8217;t need much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Adding Agile and\/or DevOps to such environments is a catastrophe before the first line of code is written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Cloud Will Bring World Peace<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The last part of the article they got from the confidence men hawking cloud services and huge data center projects. Move everything to the cloud!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Real geeks know <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sentinelone.com\/cybersecurity-101\/cloud-security\/cloud-security-statistics\/\">45% of all data breaches occur in &#8220;the cloud.&#8221;<\/a> That&#8217;s not a number I just pulled out of my ass either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>45% of data breaches occur in the cloud, with public cloud security incidents averaging $5.17 million per breach in recent years. Common causes feature misconfigurations at 23% of incidents, alongside account compromises and exploited vulnerabilities; these lead to business revenue loss from increased downtime, operational delays, and poor performance.<\/p><cite>Sentinalone<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Integrating tiny x86 minds with mainframe and Midrange systems is bad. Every one <a href=\"https:\/\/maintegrity.com\/2024-04-25-mainframe-hacks-and-consequences\/\">of these hacks<\/a> was a compromised x86 system. You simply cannot secure Open-Source software on the platform. Any platform really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was viciously insulted and otherwise trolled online when I said SSL (Secure Socket Layer) was not secure. Since then we went to SSLv2. Then SSLv3. Now TLS. Management wants a One-and-done free solution and there is no one-and-done at any price. Best you can do is a custom book code system where no two data packets use the same encryption. You can make it work with encrypted files too as long as you chunk them right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>Governments should not be moving to the cloud!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How They Got There<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, I forget which, I actually interviewed for a local government agency. It was one of the Chicago suburbs, don&#8217;t remember which one. They had a System 36 and a PDP. I had worked on PDP and went through the scam of DeVry where I got IBM exposure. It was a nice little office. The guy interviewing me had a house a couple blocks away. He walked to work. His wife was a school teacher. Neither would have more than a couple of coins to rub together during their working years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You know, the only real pitch they had was his situation. Someone who wanted a stable job to raise a family, sending their kids to those schools. Every year the salary of each municipal employee was published in the paper. Yeah, not a big selling point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now for the field goal. The job paid $36K\/yr with little hope of increases. It did come with some kind of healthcare plan. Not much for retirement. I was already working as a consultant. Consulting firms kept large stables of us around and we billed at $45\/hr.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nice pitch huh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was ten years younger than him and making more than he and his wife combined. No, I didn&#8217;t take the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Fix<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You take that $75 Billion (or whatever it was) that I.C.E. got in a claw-back bill. It goes into a fund that sets up three annual training program. One shared month of training for COBOL and SDLC. They won&#8217;t be good at the end, but you will weed out the slackers here. After that one class for each, IBM, DEC, and Unisys. Each class provides months of in-class hands-on training for the specific platform. Students that make it to the end (expect close to half to wash out) do nine months at one (or more) of the agencies\/departments using the platform they got schooled on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Keep in mind that all of this training and interning is PAID. It has to be paid at a living wage for the area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the end of that nine months, if people like what you are doing, you now have a job for life. No incompetent D.OG.E. team canning people willy-nilly. You won&#8217;t earn a lot of money, but you will have a health plan and retirement. As long as you keep doing good work, don&#8217;t grab ass you shouldn&#8217;t, never show up to work drunk\/stoned, and don&#8217;t join any terror cells (that includes Proud Boys and Oath Keepers); you have a job for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Until we got Incompetence Incorporated in the White House, that was the one salient pitch a government job had. If you were willing to live near the bottom of the middle class, having no chance to climb the middle class ladder higher, you had a job for life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Until a government job is once again a job for life, nobody will be interested. You can&#8217;t fix that with snake oil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I get the Route Fifty morning email because that&#8217;s what is left of Government Computing News magazine. Don&#8217;t worry, you can&#8217;t find any reference to Government Computing magazine via Google. You see, Government Computing News magazine was the only media to publicly document the reason HealthCare.gov failed during its initial roll-out. Agile. All of the rest of the media simply quoted the peddlers of this fatal snake oil who all said it failed because it &hellip; <a title=\"The Last IBM Engineer\" class=\"bnm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/information-technology\/route-fifty\/\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Last IBM Engineer<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1309,3,4],"tags":[1274,438,2372,339,639,2396,109,2394],"class_list":["post-7808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experience","category-information-technology","category-thank-you-sir-may-i-have-another","tag-agile","tag-cobol","tag-d-o-g-e","tag-dec","tag-government","tag-government-computing-news","tag-ibm","tag-route-fifty","bnm-entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Last IBM Engineer &#8211; Logikal Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I get the Route Fifty morning email because that&#039;s what is left of Government Computing News magazine. 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He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++\/Qt touchscreen\/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the \"Zinc It!\" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc. A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome \"The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer\" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there \"The Minimum You Need to Know\" book series was born. Three years later he wrote his first novel \"Infinite Exposure\" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of \"The Earth That Was\" trilogy: Infinite Exposure Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.","sameAs":["https:\/\/theminimumyouneedtoknow.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/author\/seasoned_geek\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7809,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7808\/revisions\/7809"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.logikalsolutions.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}