Earl Wiener, 55, a University of Miami professor of management science, telling the Airline Pilots Association (in jest) about 21st century aircraft:
"The crew will consist of one pilot and a dog. The pilot will nurture and feed the dog. the dog will be there to bite the pilot if he touches anything.
-- Fortune, Sept. 26, 1988

Change HPE with Corporate America and you still have a true statement.

I have a box of 2500 unpunched, punch cards that I can donate to the government if they run short.

What's to stop Apple from creating a new corporation overseas and have them hold the IOS source code there? Apple USA no longer has access to the source code, and the new company tells the US Government to go suck an egg.

Supply and demand baby. It rarely comes around to working stiffs. If CEOs can demand oodles of money since they're such a rare talent (haha), then techies with a desirable skill set can too.

Grab as much as you can, as fast as you can. The company will get rid of you as fast as they can sometime in the future.

Beat me to it.

As Robert A. Heinlein said "“Look, Ben, a roller skating rink is a church—as long as some sect claims that roller skating is essential to their faith and a part of their worship. You wouldn’t even have to go that far—simply claim that roller skating served a desirable though not essential function parallel to that which religious music serves in most churches. If you can sing to the glory of God, you can skate to the same end. Believe me, this has all been threshed out. There are temples in Malaya which are nothing—to an outsider—but boarding houses for snakes . . . but the same High Court rules them to be ‘churches’ as protects our own sects.”

RFC1925 #11 - Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works. So no, we're not.

But not before they receive their $$$$$ and moved on to their next opportunity.

Suggests that management hubris plays a big part in IT Failures.

You're so wrong. Google "amount of COBOL used today" you'll see the real story.

"IBM estimates that more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are still being used across industries such as banking..."

If all COBOL code suddenly stopped working, well, how are your stone knives and bearskin making skills? Banks, insurance companies would fail, and then goes the rest of the interconnected economy.

There still are plenty of US based mainframe system programmers around, but less everyday for sure. As far as "qualified" mainframe systems people in India, well that's up for discussion. What I do know, based on my research is that senior people, where senior might be a little more than being able to spell zOS, they're being paid about 1/10th of what I'm being paid. People who have just had their training wheels taken off, which is most of them, are paid more like 1/15th of a US based person.

Actually they're outsourcing most of our support to IBM and AT&T, most of the IBM people are in India. They spared me (for now).

58 years old for me and just survived another downsizing, offshoring experience. zOS Systems Programmer, 20 years here, 36 total in the field.