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PM_ME_YOUR_VICAR114 karma

If you want anonymity, I'd remove some details from that reply.

PM_ME_YOUR_VICAR113 karma

You must work in a frustrating place. From my experience (which includes a large bank), it could well be very much different.

It's a POS and logistics system, so shouldn't be internet-facing; therefore security is less of a concern.

It's probably a 3rd-party POS. Why write one in-house when you can get it off the shelf far cheaper? So if the vendor hasn't yet made it win-7 compliant (or worse, they've gone bust) then you simply can't upgrade.

If it's in-house, then the in-house team may be struggling. The new rules introduced with Win7 meant that my employer (a software house) had to hold back Win7 support for a while, until we got everything fixed and certified. Luckily, there wasn't that much to do, so it only took a few months to track it all down and update it (ours is a small code-base of a couple of million lines of code).

If you're interested, we fell foul of security stuff: programs can no longer write anywhere they want on the HDD, but have to stick to user folders. That's been the guideline for years, but WIn7 enforced it. Our app did it all over the place: logs and config settings and all sorts was spread out into the most surprising corners. You think you've got them all and then QA report that they can now reach screen X but it barfs when the user clicks a menu. Dammit!

In addition, I'd imagine that a company like UPS want metrics from their sales system. The 3rd party POS probably doesn't provide that. It will, however, export the data somehow.

Then UPS IT will have built a whole slew of systems which take the data in that format and provide the metrics which drive strategic decisions (and without which management is blind).

So you can't just swap out your POS for another 3rd party system: you have to re-write all your data import code before you can go live on the new system. How many dependent systems are there? Well, there could be hundreds; even thousands.

Which is easy if the original devs used MVC with a persistence layer. But.. you and I both know, working in IT, that if you have one single system to interface with, that it's been there for years, and there's no plan to replace it... yeah.. why bother with a persistence layer?

So best to write a translation layer from the old system to the new, I'd imagine. That in itself could be a huge job, though. Who knows what all that undocumented stuff actually does? What is that field, and why is it a VARCHAR instead of a double? Do we ever get non-numeric data, or was the dev being lazy and/or stupid?

The analysis alone of the datastore could be a massive undertaking. You can't have it handling a million orders on day one and have 1% got wrong. That's huge.

So if you're paying Microsoft, say, $100,000 a year to provide support for XP and mitigating your risks until you're ready, then that's a pretty good (and cheap) deal compared to the alternatives (having management go blind and/or fuck up 1% of the orders per day when your replacement systems go live). Even a million a year would be better. Even five million.

Those numbers do get noticed on budgets. So whatever plan they have will have been approved by senior management, and for something like this, I'd imagine it's gone all the way up the chain and somebody had to give a summary to the board.

It's almost certainly not like you describe it.

edit grammar

PM_ME_YOUR_VICAR31 karma

There is an STD test which involves that. It used to be part of the standard screening here in the UK. Last time I got checked, they didn't do it. They explained that the test only picks up STDs which have other symptoms anyway, so they dropped it from the screening unless you report burning while peeing.