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New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

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Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#111

Post by abeyer »

xienze wrote: post #72
nodesocket wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#112

Post by asfgitnuinb89u »

RickJWagner wrote: post #34
tantalor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Easy there. We're standing on the shoulders of those COBOL giants. What's obvious in 2020 was cutting-edge and forward-thinking in 1960. The rude kids of 2080 may sneer at your best code circa 2020.

We are not standing on the shoulders of COBOL. We are standing on the shoulders of ALGOL and LISP. Those languages influenced everything that came after in every field of computing. COBOL has had little influence outside of its silo.

We should absolutely respect the history of our field, but the mere fact that COBOL is old doesn't make it an important part of history.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#113

Post by 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?

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#114

Post by mirimir »

Zenst wrote: post #71
tareqak wrote: post #68

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 c…

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

> Your grandparents would make their own butter, bread, many things today that are not so common.

I've never made butter, but I have used raw milk. And I've failed at whipping cream, by overdoing it. So from what I've seen, "making butter" is basically just agitating cream until the fat clumps, and then pressing out the whey.

Making bread, I admit, takes more skill.

My mother knew how to make blood pudding. But that's not something I miss very much.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#115

Post by diek »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

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 bee…

SDLC is often used to emphasize that you need to be familiar with the full "Software Development Lifecycle". When I read SDLC I just assume they mean, "you need to be able to take a project from concept to deployment (including documentation for supporting it long term)". Depending on org structures, a lot of engineers only work on one part of that pipeline throughout their career.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#116

Post by synack »

tareqak wrote: post #68

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 c…

Given enough time I'm sure we can figure it out. The problem is that they're not looking for archaeologists, they're looking for people who lived among the dinosaurs.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#117

Post by renewiltord »

neaanopri wrote: post #103
meow1032 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Did you apply? I think it would be interesting to hear the story of what it looks like inside if you decide to work with them.

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#119

Post by _delirium »

LeoTinnitus wrote: post #108
dehrmann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system

#120

Post by OGWhales »

asfgitnuinb89u wrote: post #112
RickJWagner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy there. We're standing on the shoulders of those COBOL giants. What's obvious in 2020 was cutting-edge and forward-thinking in 1960. The rude kids of 2080 may sneer at your best code circa 2020.

We are not standing on the shoulders of COBOL. We are standing on the shoulders of ALGOL and LISP. Those languages influenced everything that came after in every field of computing. COBOL has had little influence outside of its silo. We should absolutely respect the history of our field, but the mere fact that COBOL is old doesn't make it an important part of history.

That fact that the many industries, most importantly the financial industry heavily rely on it makes it an important part of history.

I agree cobol as a language is not particularly glamorous in terms of what it brought it computer science. I say this as a cobol dev, so I’m laughing, but it’s true: cobol sucks.

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