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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

#251

Post by abeyer »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #224
abeyer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

> 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.

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

#252

Post by orestarod »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #243
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…

> 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. What a terribly wrong take. If you really believe the system is that corrupted, and that horrible then you know darn well that the count of people who suffered during this emergency won't make a difference. There will…

That's a good reason. You don't need a moral reason to not choose a paid job. The reason scores of families will go hungry because of the mismanagement, not because one human did not step up to keep the mess rolling. In analogy, the reason Africa is starving is because of the past and present extreme exploitation from foreign powers, and said foreign powers sponsored corruption and violence. Not because "a heartless middle class salary man did not send his monthly 10 dollars", turning a blind eye to the real causes of the situation.

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

#253

Post by tomohawk »

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.

No. It is worth holding the bad boss accountable and firing the bad boss who put them in this situation in the first place.

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

#254

Post by jstewartmobile »

schmichael wrote: post #57

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…

you make relieveing the government of its social obligations so it can do more wars / interventions / bailouts sound like it has some kind of humanitarian dimension...

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

#255

Post by schmichael »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #254
schmichael wrote: post #57

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…

you make relieveing the government of its social obligations so it can do more wars / interventions / bailouts sound like it has some kind of humanitarian dimension...

Governments are made by people, of people, and for people. If you disagree with how the US government functions the answer is to get more involved, not less.

Slinging COBOL for New Jersey is not going to drop more bombs in Syria, but it might just save some lives by managing government operations more efficiently in a moment when every hour and dollar counts.

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

DonHopkins wrote: post #173
Falkon1313 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an effort to be more efficient, I've begun sneering at it as I write it.

I just go m-x auto-sneer-mode and Emacs automatically sneers at my code as I write it! I like to edit the source code to auto-sneer-mode.el in sneer mode, so it sneers at itself! Nothing more snarky than self-sneering code. I had to manually sneer by myself while writing it, to get it bootstrapped.

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by erik_seaberg »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #110
Falkon1313 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an effort to be more efficient, I've begun sneering at it as I write it.

Why not sneer proactively ahead of time?

We used to maintain multi-user machines with useful software preinstalled. It took tremendous post-deployment sneering to get from there to Docker.

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

#258

Post by renewiltord »

schmichael wrote: post #57

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…

People are asking "Can I bring my comparative advantage to bear?" because obviously the best way I can contribute if I were making half a million dollars is to take $50k of my post tax income and allocate it to boosting the salary offered.

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

#259

Post by scarface74 »

nickkell wrote: post #244
scarface74 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still haven’t learned. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Nobody's going to eat the government's lunch. There are still people around today who know COBOL, but how many years will that last?

It’s not like COBOL is some indecipherable language that requires a Rosetta Stone to translate. If there is a market for it and someone is willing to pay enough, people will learn it.

But didn’t IBM have a system to convert COBOL to Java that the federal government was using?

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

#260

Post by pas »

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…

No, it's not. These state IT systems and this habit that leads to their inevitable downfall needs to die.

They respect nothing. Scope? No, we need to fulfill every need and some. Budget? No, of course we don't have cash, and we have to be very careful, it's the taxpayers' money! Time? It's already late! (Yet they weren't able to get it done in 10+ years.)

They have no real competency, they don't even have competency to delegate this to someone competent. And they lack the competency to manage their own inconsistency regarding these issues.

The linked tweet thread is a perfect example of this. (Rampant project mismanagement; too big to fail; they introduced some Hadoop scoring system to match inconsistent records and whatnot instead of simply throwing out all the bad data and handing the rest separately - eg hiring a bunch of unemployed people to go over them.)

A state that should be at the top of any kind of project management and procurement hierarchies wasn't able to supervise an IT system project. It's so incompetent just thinking about it will lead to spontaneous combustion.

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