New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by Frost1x » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #121

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.

I would normally agree, but emergencies can create opportunities for improvements in the process. See healthcare.gov for example.

"Chaos is a ladder" though it didn't turn out so well for that fictional character, his assessment wasn't wrong.

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

#262

Post by jstewartmobile » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:38 PM UTC

schmichael wrote: post #255

jstewartmobile wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i must concede that bailing out local bureaucrats who haven't been doing their jobs in order to help predominantly able-bodied dependents of the state is a slight improvement.

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

#263

Post by boneitis » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:41 PM UTC

schmichael wrote: post #93

incompatible wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine making even a minor change to the COBOL code. It's not likely to be very well structured or comprehensible. I'm guessing there would be a lot of global variables and strange database / file system interfaces. Very hard to do it without breaking something somewhere. Edit: per the thread starting with vaidhy's comment.

Just yesterday there was an exciting post about printing off pages of assembly and reverse engineering archaic encryption using a crayon. If you thought that was exciting I can't imagine hacking on archaic COBOL codebase could be much worse in terms of quality of tooling! There's also a much better chance you'll have a say in the replacement if you work on and understand the original.

I couldn't track it down. Would you be able to relocate and link it?

I'd love to see it, as someone who draws and colors all over printouts for reverse engineering challenges.

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

#264

Post by Zenst » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #175

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure that individual was referring to themselves with that term.

I am pretty sure my intent was not to misgender him (else I wouldn't have said "Or"), but to point out that women can be Super Cobol Programmers too, and in fact the first Super Cobol Programmer was a woman. If you're touchy about people gently correcting accidental unintended sexism, take a moment to think about how women like Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace have felt about being on the receiving end of systematic int…

I just vouched this after it just got flagged and as it is in response to myself that sent this path in motion and already been covered in this thread and no offence was meant or intended by myself of Don Hopkins, can we please read thru it all is cool.

We are all human after all and words are like code - bugs happen and we all operate our own unique brain-CPU's so things can and do run differently. No lines need to be read between here. Be well all and sorry, just thought I should clarify in the name of fairness for all and Don did nothing wrong in my eye's and it's all good.

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

#265

Post by analognoise » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

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.

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

#266

Post by AmericanChopper » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #228

throw_m239339 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making good points. First, I'm talking about a PL "middleware" layer than does not necessarily involves restructuring the data itself (basically, instead of querying tables or views, you query stored procedures or functions). When it comes to version control, wouldn't a migration system suffice to assess the state of that layer? As for unit testing, I kind of agree, it's possible though, like any other program…

That doesn’t help. You can’t imagine the times I see Get_Customer_1 Get_Customer_2 Get_Customer_3 As far as version control, if someone does make a change to the unversioned “Get_Customer” and I want to switch branches. How do I make sure all of the stored procedures are in sync?

This is pretty much my experience with stored proc codebases too. I do consider SQL to be a very simple language, but store proc codebases tend to become incredibly complex. Finding an engineer that can maintain SQL code is very easy. Finding one that can maintain a particular maze of 1000+ stored procedures, views, functions, table triggers... is a completely different question.

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

#267

Post by masonic » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

AllanHoustonSt wrote: post #125

downvoteme1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be surprised if this position then goes to an H1B contractor though. If enough anericans who have this knowledge do not apply because they - Hate the tech - Can’t provide their feedback to improve the system - Don’t like the salary offered even if’s greater than their current unemployment income, then is it for an offshore company to come in and fill that gap.

Which popular H1B source countries teach COBOL? I feel like the advent of cheap offshore programming came well after the decline of COBOL. Though my sense of history can very well be off.

I'm sure that Tata/Infosys/Cognizant will be happy to supply you with dozens of CVs claiming COBOL experience and then give crash courses to any candidates selected.

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

#268

Post by pm90 » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:11 PM UTC

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #232

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…

Jonathan Blow has a point that we cannot assume things will keep getting better. Although he says that we cannot fix software because we have chronically not done it for decades, his thesis is that the solution is to make software simpler. The issue I have with making things simpler is that if we don’t know how to fix things because we haven’t done it for decades, how can we make things simpler, when we haven’t done…

This is a very hard problem. Not a silver bullet but I’ve often found that metrics are the best way (again not guaranteed) to get the money (wo)men on board. If you can demonstrate concretely how the legacy code affects your operational readiness or agility, it might make it a better sell to invest in refactoring. However the lack of standard tools to do this is a problem.

The problem with code is that most non technical companies don’t have a clue how this thing works. They use analogies. And for most folks the analogy is that of a machine that once built never breaks down. If you can demonstrate viscerally how bad the system is, it can help get better support.

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

#269

Post by DrScump » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

agildehaus wrote: post #155

DrScump wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That film's horrible misrepresentation of UNIX almost ruined it for me.

How exactly? Versus something like CSI, Jurassic Park got a lot of things right. The computers used were real SGI SPARCStations and they had a bunch of Thinking Machines CM-5s for gene sequencing in the background shots. I believe all of the on-screen shots were done with real Irix software (including the scene where they locked the doors, which was done using a real IRIX file manager called "fsn"). Sure it was given…

My vivid memory is of that excruciatingly slow zoom into a bar graph representation of a directory, to which the girl exclaims, "this is UNIX! I know UNIX!". A real world UNIXer would go straight to a shell prompt, especially in a time crunch with Cretaceous predators at the door.

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

#270

Post by jki275 » Sun, Apr 05, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #250

jki275 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t hire a contractor at that rate either. DCAA controls that very closely. If a defense contractor wants to pay someone that kind of money they generally have to pay the difference between what dcaa allows and that price out of their own overhead.

What's the difference between "overhead" and "salary" for the contractor? If they charge 500k for the job and give 250k to their employee, it doesn't really matter whether they billed him at an hourly rate of $30 or $300.

Overhead comes out of company budget. The company has to make it up. They can't charge 500k for the job, they can charge whatever the DCAA approved labor rate for the engineer is per hour. Anything else they want to charge the gov for they have to pay out of their pocket.