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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

#181

Post by exhilaration »

perl4ever wrote: post #83
sbierwagen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a taste: https://qntm.org/zomg >System z is a living fossil; it is computing archaeology; computing palaeontology. System z is an example of the principle "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" carried to its logical extreme. System z and its predecessors haven't broken for forty-five years: the "z" stands for "zero downtime" and some of these machines have been running continuously for decades without a reboot. No…

"AS YOU KNOW, "Return" and "Enter" are separate keys on your keyboard" Just FYI, my laptop has "Enter" clearly printed on both keys.

Things were different in the old days, young padawan: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4800-52-mainframe-du...

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

#182

Post by imtringued »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #41
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.

Did software engineering exist back then.

That's an incredibly bad argument. If they wrote the programs 40 years ago and still use them they had 40 years to fix the business process. You can't argue that something is broken because it's old and then argue that you didn't have enough time to fix the process.

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

#183

Post by cvhashim »

KhoomeiK wrote: post #161
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Getting Atlas Shrugged vibes. Lots of parallels with this situation actually.

Seems like OP is describing the plight of the average worker who gets left to clean up the mess with no credit at the end of it all and less of the business leaders or executives.

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

#187

Post by throw_m239339 »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #126
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…

For all of these large, old organisations that still use COBOL, the risk isn’t that they run out of COBOL engineers to hire. COBOL is a very simple programming language, it was designed to be as simple as SQL. SQL was designed to be so easy that non-programmer business analysts could use it, COBOL was designed to be the same thing, but for non-DB business logic. Though you could debate how successful either of them w…

The irony for me is that SQL is the language that stood up the test of time the most. All other are/were gamble.

Obviously it's not fit for all domains, since it's a DSL for data management, but I'm often tempted to push as much business logic into the DB with PL as I'm allowed to instead of having to do things in the application code itself, and it paid off many times, as I have rarely seen a project moving from a database to another, while application code is often rewritten in many different languages for no other reason than management's whims. I probably saved some businesses millions of dollars in code porting/rewriting/migration.

> The risk these organisations face is finding people capable of maintaining their particular decades old COBOL spaghetti. Which is really just an ordinary key person risk.

In my experience, the biggest issue is the complete lack of code documentation, as organisations relies on a handful of developers to maintain their codebases and when these developers retire, suddenly, nobody can understand an architecture.

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

#188

Post by PappaPatat »

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…

> I was sort of tempted to pursue this.

For me the exact opposite. 15 years ago I removed any and all reverence to my history of COBOL because I was suddenly actively being contacted for COBOL coding jobs.

Although I had a great time, as a starting coder, with COBOL jobs (transcoding COBOL to C at the time), I know one thing: ever ever again will I utter one like of COBOL code.

There are still people making very decent money doing it, but the lockin to one particular source of work just does not sound like what I could bare.

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

#189

Post by _v7gu »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #163
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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... 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…

Consistently assigning work to big firms who consistently screw up... All they want to do is show that "they're trying", and the charade will continue until someone does get fired for buying IBN.

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

#190

Post by throw_m239339 »

c3534l wrote: post #15

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.

> 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.

Lack of foresight, lack of understanding that codebases are a living thing and are never "done". But hey, let's all work for ad companies and put our best minds at solving how we could make people see more ads!

Isn't it the power of the executive branch to requisition corporations or people in time of deep crisis in order maintain the continuity of government and its critical systems? Isn't unemployment claims such a critical system?

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