
New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system - enraged_camel
https://twitter.com/manicode/status/1246497036389793792
======
thaumaturgy
I was sort of tempted to pursue this. I did a few years in the salty COBOL
mines back when I was a PFY about 20...plus years ago. This niche probably
hasn't moved very much since then and I could probably recall most of it after
a few hours. I'm freelancing right now anyway and some other projects just
vaporized.

But.

A quick skim of the postings is finding that what they're really screaming for
is somebody who's been familiar with _their particular_ pile of toxic waste
for at least four years at minimum. They're asking for people with 4+ years of
COBOL, and JCL (ok, fine), and DB2, and VSAM, and "SDLC" (proto-waterfall),
and, oh yeah, a four-year degree.

Heck, there's a posting asking for somebody to draw diagrams and document
their existing processes, and for that they expect you to have 10 years of
COBOL experience.

Okay then. This is not yet a mess that they're motivated enough to fix.

~~~
_bxg1
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.

~~~
meow1032
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.

~~~
neaanopri
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.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
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.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
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...](https://www.nj.com/politics/2014/11/nj_ends_118_million_contract_to_boost_enrollment_in_obamacare_other_social_service_programs.html)

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)

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

~~~
scarface74
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.

~~~
coribuci
> 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 ...

------
schmichael
Techies: What can we do to help? 3D print ventilators? Process terabytes of
data in seconds? AI?!

Govt: We need COBOL programmers.

Techies: I am powerless to help.

But seriously some of the brightest techies I know quit their jobs to do a
stint of government work which included slinging VBA and ASP Classic to remove
SQL injections from VA websites and other similarly unglamorous tasks with
huge impact.

If you want to be patriotic. If you want to make a difference. Government work
can do that. You're probably not going to train a neural net to solve
coronavirus, but you'll probably be able to stop 1000 hacks from ever
happening or get help to someone who really truly needs it.

~~~
incompatible
I could help rewrite in some other language.

~~~
scarface74
We still haven’t learned.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-
should-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-
do-part-i/)

~~~
sgift
It was a bad rule back then, it is even worse now and it didn't even stand the
test of time at Fog Creek (or Glitch, looks like they have renamed
themselves), where they had to do it for FogBugz to finally leave Wasabi
behind. I could go on about how Firefox ended up very well and not as the
complete disaster that Joel predicted back then, but that's besides the point
here, namely: There can be good reasons to rewrite something and "hey, we do
not find remotely enough people to work on the current code base" is pretty
far up on that list.

~~~
goto11
Netscape went from the dominant browser to a negligible browser share. They
basically handed the browser market to IE on a platter. They only rebounded
somewhat because MS abandoned IE development altogether. And the result of the
rewrite was not even that good, which can be seen from everybody else building
on webkit rather than Mozilla.

~~~
JoshuaDavid
I think the unspoken and (imo) wrong assumption here is that if you have a
codebase which nobody understands, and the success of your organization relies
on iterating rapidly and correctly on that codebase for its continued
survival, there is anything you can do that has a high probability of success.

If you are in that situation, and you do not do a rewrite, you are likely to
fail.

If you are in that situation, and you do a rewrite, you are likely to fail.

Sometimes there is no winning move.

~~~
goto11
I don't doubt the existing code was a mess, but I'm pretty sure their time
would have been better spent refactoring it into a more modular structure. For
example, what actually made people switch to Firefox eventually was tabs and a
popup-blocker. There was no need to rewrite the entire network stack from
scratch to support this.

------
vaidhy
I used to work on mainframe COBOL during the Y2K times. While the language is
easy to pick up and the OS specific things are not too hard, the style of
programming can lead to issues. Typically, shared data structures are often
stored in separate files called copybooks and they can be hard to track down.
Most of the code is not in any source control repositories which means no one
knows which is the actual deployed version. It was all fun times then..

~~~
tantalor
That's not an issue with "style of programming", it's just complete disregard
of software engineering basics.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Did software engineering exist back then.

~~~
PunksATawnyFill
Yes, it did. In fact, CASE tools were going to be all the rage: computer-aided
software engineering.

One of them was METHOD/1 from Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). If you
wanted to create a variable to hold, for example, a part number... you'd
create an entry in the CASE tool for it and from then on, everyone was
supposed to use that one. It would have validation rules, like 30 characters,
alphanumeric, whatever.

The CASE tool would do code generation for screens and forms and whatnot.
And.... that's about as much as I remember at the moment.

~~~
ztjio
CASE tools are widely used today, but, you will see them scoped very
specifically the databases in systems where everything is built around the
massive pillar of a major db implementation.

I worked for a company for little while that made extremely effective use of
this approach allowing hundreds of devs to effectively work simultaneously on
a single monolithic system. It was shocking. I was so impressed. I've still
never seen any software organization so... organized. And they owed it largely
to the protocols revolving around their use of a CASE tool.

------
CWuestefeld
This is all second-hand, etc., but from what I've heard, NJ's IT systems are a
mess across the board.

The most shocking story was about their system for tracking Medicaid patients.
Their system had a fixed-width field for the patient's ID, and they ran out of
identifiers - so they just started to recycle them again from the beginning.
This problem was multiplied by the fact that, to say money, they didn't have
backups of the original, clean data before the recycling. Thus it became
pretty much impossible to understand what benefits had been afforded (or not)
to whom.

Governmental budgeting seems biased strongly in favor of labor expenses,
especially those with seniority, to the detriment of the maintenance of
capital assets. This is pretty much a recipe for technological debt.

~~~
tjr225
Any state government it department is going to be a royal mess. I worked for
the Washington state government for 6 months a few years ago and it was the
worst job I’d ever had.

I was at the top of my pay grade just under architect and only two years out
of college making around 68k a year in Olympia. Olympia is not a cheap place
to live. On top of that you’re basically legislates NOT to do work.

------
tareqak
This issue highlights one of my main fears about a pandemic such as COVID-19:
if enough people with the necessary amount of knowledge to maintain necessary
infrastructure die without sufficiently and timely trained replacements, then
civilization as we know it becomes one more step closer towards total
irrecoverable collapse.

The prevalence of COBOL and other older programming languages in many parts of
the world's critical infrastructure (unemployment claims here, finance,
government, defense) means that the average age of someone maintaining these
systems tends older. Older people tend to have more health issues. From the
summaries of reports I read about COVID-19, the majority of the deaths happen
among the elderly and those with other health conditions.

The idea of civilization collapsing might seem fanciful and farfetched, but
the idea struck me after watching a video that was submitted here on HN and
the videos it references [0][1][2][3].

[0] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only) -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-
SOdj4Kkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk)

[1] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY)
\-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY)

[3] Eric Cline | 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyry8mgXiTk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyry8mgXiTk)

~~~
Zenst
Many generational skills die out. Your grandparents would make their own
butter, bread, many things today that are not so common. Then more, many
skills lost over time and fact we are still working out some historical things
got created, you can imagine rosetta code sites being a good thing to keep
alive for the future.
[http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code)

~~~
bcrosby95
The difference you're missing is we're still relying on COBOL, but we aren't
relying on grandparents to make the butter and bread we eat lest we starve.

~~~
Grimm1
Not ideal, but it's not like it couldn't be migrated to another language and
COBOL docs are readily available to at least understand the language. We would
find a way.

~~~
Zenst
I've worked for a software migration company and for some languages and the
bulk of code you can automate the migration. However you also need to migrate
the data and then anything that touches that data, so whilst you may want to
migrate one program, that program will be a suit of programs and systems
making it a more complicated task than it appears on the surface.

If you can data warehouse aspects off, that's great and can slowly bite away,
migrate chunks bit by bit. Though one of the last will often be the database
itself. Report generation is often an area that will hit resources hard and
can also be easiest to migrate away towards something better using a system
that periodically syncs the database onto another platform with all the latest
do it yourself easy accessible tools. That allows those wanting the reports to
be able to make and change that themselves removing a lot of code development
and main system overhead.

With that, knowing the language is not even half the battle, the business
knowledge would be the lion's share and to integrate the two skills
effectively, that's where the money is.

You could have a payroll system, migrate line by line, logic by logic from
COBOL to C. Yet the way the data is handled, the nuances of the way the
languages round numbers, store data, formats, handle exceptions or early
termination. It's not just a case of setting the right flags in the compiler
and job done.

But yes, there is always a way. As always, the devil is in the detail.

~~~
Kye
One solution I saw somewhere here on HN the last time it came up was to
carefully virtualize the existing systems so they have snapshots to restore
from when things go wrong. That opens the possibility of moving the data to
more modern systems with a translation layer between the 40 year old systems
and the new systems that slowly replace them.

------
trynewideas
This will sound weird, but they should call up Northwestern State University
of Louisiana for an alumni list. They were one of the last 4-year places that
had a COBOL-focused degree program, through to at least 2012.

~~~
selimthegrim
Probably CGI in Lafayette hires them all

------
commandlinefan
Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.

~~~
nodesocket
I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they
are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than
mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer?
I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get
outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove
government needs to be competitive with private business to attract talent.
Especially in national security and healthcare roles.

~~~
xienze
> why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer?

If you're making that kind of money, you have a lot better options than
working on some ancient COBOL system that processes unemployment claims.

~~~
abeyer
> If you're making that kind of money, you have a lot better options than
> working on some ancient COBOL system that processes unemployment claims.

There's more to life than money and tech. I'm sure there are plenty of people
who would be happy to work on a boring tech stack in helping to address
possibly the largest public crisis many of us will see in our lifetimes vs.
working with the new fad of the week in pursuit of selling ads marginally more
efficiently.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Then the strategy of undervaluing the work of creating and maintaining robust
systems will be validated.

Why spend the money and invest now for the future, when you can lean on people
to donate their efforts in times of crisis?

~~~
abeyer
> Why spend the money and invest now for the future, when you can lean on
> people to donate their efforts in times of crisis?

First, no one said anything about donating effort...the scenario was getting
paid a decent, if not quite FAANG, salary to work on an older tech stack. And
sure, you _could_ take that approach. We tried it with pandemic preparation,
let's see how that works out.

~~~
cultus
It's really not sustainable or realistic to rely on altruism. Taking a huge
pay cut to work on awful systems nobody wants to deal with exceeds how much
nearly anyone is willing to help.

Just giving a frigging UBI for at least the duration of this crisis would
solve all of these problems and work much better.

------
c3534l
The point at which the government should have rewritten their COBOL systems
into a language that would have a talent pool to draw from was at least 30
years ago.

~~~
_delirium
There's a claim in one of the reply threads that they contracted HP to build a
replacement years ago, but the project didn't succeed:
[https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440](https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440)

~~~
dehrmann
This feels like government thinking around infrastructure or military hardware
where you open up bids and accept the lowest offer.

While there are problems with lowest-bidder-win, the real issue here is that
systems like this are more living and breathing than one-off; you need a teams
that tend to them, not bringing in a contractor.

~~~
LeoTinnitus
This is what happens when you have typical business moron-types get elected
roles that treat complicated systems as though it's construction work.

It is, but you can't have any joe schmoe off the street coming in and learn
how to pour concrete in a day. This is something that requires practice and
problem solving skills. And years of it.

~~~
_delirium
Judging by how a lot of construction projects have gone, this might also be
usefully applied to pouring concrete [1]!

[1] [https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/major-concrete-
issu...](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/major-concrete-issues-found-
in-silver-line-metro-extension/53398/)

------
chmaynard
I assume that every state unemployment compensation dept. has the same basic
set of requirements as New Jersey with a slightly different set of business
rules. Here's a crazy idea: all 50 states could cooperate and hire a company
to develop a flexible, secure, modern system that's easier and cheaper to
maintain.

~~~
xyst
The basic set of requirements are the easy part.

It’s when you have to account for the differences between each state (50
factors!) is where the software becomes O(n^n) complex over the development of
this product.

Even the best private companies struggle to build similar systems for a single
entity.

I think each state should be accountable for their own programs. Avoids the
“single point of failure” issue as well.

~~~
imtringued
There are still benefits to choosing the same ecosystem. If everyone uses Java
or Go and the same web framework then they can invest money into libraries
that are useful for all 50 states. I've been at organizations that simply
decided to use the same stack as another state (not USA). You end up using the
same plugins and libraries. Even if you choose the wrong ecosystem because it
is not mature enough you can just build it yourself and everyone benefits.

~~~
prirun
The problem is, you have to get the politicians to agree to the same policies
so that the code works for both states. Politicians don't like to be told "You
have to do it this way because of the computer system". Politicians want to
decide the rules, then make everyone follow them. They don't follow rules
themselves.

------
vikramkr
How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm
sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that
might be able to help

~~~
Analemma_
The thing about old COBOL systems is, the language isn't the problem. Snark
aside, it isn't _that_ bad.

The major issue is the code written in it. Remember, a _lot_ of COBOL code
comes from a time before a lot of programming best practices were discovered.
Structured programming-- as in, actually having function calls instead of just
GOTO statements everywhere-- was a novel hoity-toity concept when COBOL first
existed. Relational databases? Forget about it, they won't exist for another
decade and a half. You get flat files; if you're _lucky_ there might be field
separators, if you're unlucky you'll have to find the column widths in the
code somewhere. And don't even think that any of it is documented.

That's the sort of thing you're taking on when you jump into a legacy COBOL
system.

~~~
ravenstine
That, and I don't imagine there's any tests written for a lot of these
systems. :(

~~~
bitwize
There are plenty of tests written for them.

They are just manual tests written up on literal, actual TPS reports (TPS =
Test Procedure Specification) to be executed by humans.

~~~
spitfire
My god. Are you serious? TPS reports are real?

~~~
jedieaston
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report)

And were widely used, at one point.

------
fredsmith42
I've got COBOL experience, but Everytime I check into these positions they
aren't paying very well. I don't know about this particular case, but in
general COBOL programmers aren't valued very much, despite the high demand
within the narrow niches that still use COBOL.

------
RickJWagner
I imagine the COBOL programmers are in the high-risk group for coronavirus.

~~~
DrScump
Unless working in a Halon-protected, 50-degree, raised floor environment
confers immunity. It's only fair.

------
dtbraun
Interesting. My family is pressuring me I should help out. I’m a retired
expert with Cobol68, Cobol74 and Cobol85 (w/embedded SQL). Entire 42+ years
career was on Burroughs/Unisys (early years) and Tandem Nonstop. I was on a
Y2K project for a very large telecommunications company and had to change A
LOT of COBOL code. In later years I managed software development teams. But at
64 years old, I ask myself do I want to work in any Covid-19 epicenters.

------
blululu
I'm sure there is a lot to be said about the absurdity of this situation, but
somehow this cartoon came to mind:
[https://abstrusegoose.com/323](https://abstrusegoose.com/323)

------
mjcohen
I did COBOL for about 18 months in the Army in 1967-1968 on a RCA 501. Wonder
if I would qualify. None of that other fancy stuff, though. Also RCA 301
assembly language.

~~~
DrScump
Allan Sherman, the Weird Al Yankovic of his day, turned the tune from
"Fascination" into "Automation" in 1963, a song about his RCA 503 sexually
harrassing him:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=RsDFYUD5KUA&t=20s](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RsDFYUD5KUA&t=20s)

------
olodus
For all the legacy Cobol out there and the amount of money everyone always
says there is in this part of the industry, does there exist any cross
compilers targeting Cobol lang or would it be possible for interop with other
langs to slowly move away from the old systems?

------
justmyopinion42
Wow, if they don’t have folks who can lead this redesign development project
(SDLC? Ever seen a highly critical emergency project where the SDLC was not
the first thing sacrificed in support of expediency?) 2nd is QA & testing.
Their dates never change as slipping development dates are a given. This thing
sounds like something begging to come off the rails before it even starts
(Governor begging for COBOL coders) while having degree requirements for that
kind of legacy experience? What’s the definition of a legacy system? Anything
in production!

------
robofanatic
COBOL was one of the few languages I was introduced to in college back in 90s
along with C, BASIC and FORTRAN. Even back then people used to say that COBOL
is a dying language.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
I was supposed to learn COBOL as part of class curriculum in the mid 2000s,
but it was replaced with HTML and CSS instead.

------
genieyclo
Video clip of gov:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlJqlWSPJeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlJqlWSPJeI)

------
analognoise
Would it be feasible to put the code up somewhere, along with an emulator of
the ancient system, and some dummy data for processing?

I mean they're not going to pay enough to make it worth it, but some people
might actually think it's fun, and maybe it will get more people interested.

------
Ericson2314
Ah, I've always wanted to put my software archeology skills to the test with
something like this.

------
adamsea
Has anyone ever built an interface ( software and / or custom keyboard )
specifically for interfacing with the terrible UI / ergonomics of COBOL /
mainframe systems like this?

Basically, has anyone ever built modern dev tooling or custom hardware to
reduce the pain?

~~~
ratboy666
Depends on what you mean.

For example, my editor (which I use for work like this)

    
    
      MODE-'COBOL'
        72.b -.a -.t -.h 8.h 12.h
        .r
    

Roughly: for COBOL - ring alarm bell if I type past column 72. Do not
autoindent. Do not use tabs (spaces only). Remove all tabulation except at
column 8 and column 12. For FORTRAN 66 (77) work, I just set a single
tabulation at column 7.

But that is just me. You should look into THE: The Hessling Editor on linux,
etc. Look into Regina Rexx.

which would be all the "tooling" needed. You could run a mainframe emulator
(look into Hercules)

How is 80 column "punch card" style editing and printer output terrible?

------
lazylizard
So. The problem is. The rate you quote, if you were a cobol programmer, is
that price gouging too?

------
Hpal2020
How does anyone apply for this job if they know all these skills ?
Covid19.nj.gov does not seem to post the Job at its site. Can someone help
with where did you apply or saw the JD?

------
taytus
Relevant:
[https://twitter.com/Taytus/status/1246586694461202436](https://twitter.com/Taytus/status/1246586694461202436)

------
DonHopkins
They should just build a bridge gate to connect the island of old COBOL code
with the rest of the world. But then Chris Christie would shut it down during
morning rush hour. ;(

------
ChrisArchitect
In the 24th Century....
[https://abstrusegoose.com/323](https://abstrusegoose.com/323)

------
daly
I taught COBOL in grad school and used MVS/JCL/VSAM. I was an IBM systems
programmer. I got turned down for a COBOL job a few years ago. Sigh.

------
mister_hn
They could move to ReactJS... Move fast and break things

------
pdani
Their own search for Cobol on their own site returns "Your search did not
match any answers we have" \- are they serious?

------
BooneJS
Unemployment putting people to work.

------
strategarius
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS)
Wikipedia: "However, z/OS also supports 64-bit Java, C, C++..." Managers: "Why
do we need budget spendings for that Java, everything works fine..."

------
justmyopinion42
Hmmm. Sounds like every other mission critical emergency project in dire need
of leadership, design and development. Perceived need way ahead of actual
need, and legacy hiring practices (degree Requirements for legacy coders with
10 years experience and a degree, ha) not realistic to effectively recruit
talented resources.

Job interview should include - what’s the definition of a legacy system?

Has anyone ever seen an emergency mission and time critical project where the
SDLC WASN’T the first thing sacrificed for expediency? And the second is QA &
testing - their delivery date remains fixed while development slips and slips.

The point is, if you don’t have leadership that has been there done that,
knows what is coming, is solving tomorrow’s issues (like finding and hiring
resources) so when the project gets to that point, the resources are there and
ready, then you are in the false start phase that will continue until you
admit it, and begin again with refreshed plan and clear minds.

Most SDLC’s do not recognize the false start as a very important first phase
that must happen when a time critical emergency project is the only thing that
can save the day. How long that phase lasts is dependent on how long it takes
you to bring in the right leadership team to take control and begin anew.

Since they are in panic mode with the Governor pleading for “COBALT”
programmers you know this is in the Coming off the rails / false start phase.

Some things you can’t short circuit around and luck out. not on really
important stuff.

It takes some good minds with excellent experience to noodle out what needs to
happen, how to make it happen, line up the political and technical ducks and
make it happen.

This is a technology project using a rock solid mainframe programming
language, COBOL. Don’t belittle it. Many of the nation’s largest banks still
use COBOL based systems to process their mission critical applications, so
quit whining about old mainframe technology being so obsolete.

Those of us who have been there fully understand there are no longer many or
any users who understand what entire systems do anymore - because those legacy
systems have evolved over the years, projects all justified by headcount
reductions in the user community. That means all that knowledge is now
encapsulized within that cobol code in those legacy systems.

So. If someone needs help responding to critical needs that were not
anticipated (like an increase 100 or 1000 or 10,000 times the workload - New
Jersey?), technology alone is not going to solve your problem, not quickly
enough. You need many more people to do the processing of paying the
unemployed until technology can catch up and take over.

Pay me now or pay me later I always say. If you don’t believe my predictions,
Call me when you become enlightened and I can help you then.

Until then, good luck. PS: A legacy system is every system in production!

------
ellius
This reminds me of the article "COBOL and Legacy Code as a Systemic Risk."
Like the pandemic itself, this was a foreseeable risk:

[https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/cobol-and-legacy-
cod...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/07/cobol-and-legacy-code-as-a-
systemic-risk.html)

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xyst
Companies and government agencies need to “ante up” on the refactor of their
old systems.

I hope the position goes unfilled. Worst case scenario, the unemployment
agency has to do it the analog way (“by paper”)

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Bobnaples
Where do we sign up?

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Bobnaples
Where do I sign up?

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calypso
It’s a trap!

