Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could help rewrite in some other language.
Can you also guarantee that the rewritten code does not change any undocumented behavior? I think that is the real challenge.
Maybe we'd be better off writing tests then...
New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
201–210 of 309 posts
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Surely outsourced and offshored isn't something to praise them for
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.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#203I 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 v…
Man I remember copy books. I could do... just no where near NJ. And I am not interested in re-writing anything. Just the stuff working. :)
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Fixing this system will make the difference between real people getting unemployment checks or nothing. That's worth enduring a bad boss for. In absolute terms, perhaps. But if you are moving away from taking jobs out of self interest, and into doing something for the public good; you might as well check out https://80000hours.org/ and pick the job that has the most positive impact. My guess is that working any kin…
10% of my salary wouldn’t be nearly as impactful as helping millions of people get unemployment checks quickly.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#205Techies: 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…
I could help rewrite in some other language.
We still haven’t learned.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or Cobol Woman! ;) Cobol was created by Admiral Grace Hopper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper https://medium.com/@donhopkins/cobol-forever-1a49f7d28a39
Unnecessary
Yes, but from my perspective - not unwelcome and I actually support the comment and took no misalignment or judgment from it - I'm all about balance and fairness - not that everytime the word man or women is used we have to then add lots of small print disclaimers. But it does remind us how some can read into things and reminds us to be more mindful of that aspect.
COBOL human to the rescue would of been better perhaps, so again unnecessary, yet not unwelcome and with that - everyone gets some karma.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#207I 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 did a few years in the salty COBOL mines In the mid-80s, my first year CS professor anticipated most us ending up "in the lead mines of COBOL programming" — it was commonly assumed that we'd never manage to get rid of the dominance of COBOL. Are references to mining common in the COBOL scene?
I can’t tell if you are joking, but “the salt mines” is a rather common bit of workplace humor, at least in the US.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#208Techies: 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…
a person is more likely 'to train a neural net to solve coronavirus' while working for the government than in the private sector
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
I actively avoid companies that put all of their logic in the DB. It’s harder to version control, harder to unit test, much more work to rollback. You can’t keep it in sync with the source code etc.
I can’t just switch branches and know the state of the system at the time the branch was created.