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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

#271

Post by microtherion »

tylerrobinson wrote: post #207
microtherion wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_mining#Idiomatic_use

Thanks! I genuinely was not aware of "salt mines" specifically, though I have come across mining references, and even made some myself, now that I think about it.

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

#273

Post by IanS00 »

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.

There's a difference between a generic "bad boss" and an incompetent one. An incompetent one will kill the project.

If NJ have failed to maintain legacy systems that good COBOL development needs, almost by definition they have incompetent management (and a Governor who can't even pronounce COBOL). They likely don't have the dev or test boxes that they should have. They will either put up barriers to the other systems the developer needs to understand, or will throw open the doors so that my fixes get broken by everyone else's fixes.

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

#274

Post by IanS00 »

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…

4-year degree? So that rules out Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg.

To get serious, they need to move HR aside. Many of the best techs from the '70s and 80s dropped out of college. What was called for back then was real-world experience, not slips of paper.

I seem to spend most of my working life trying not to embarrass people with 4-year degrees who can't even spell things like "COBOL".

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

#275

Post by burfog »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #177
burfog wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't asking for so much. They want: 1. understanding the language (COBOL) 2. IBM mainframe experience (JCL, DB2, VSAM, SDLC) 3. credentialed (4-year degree) Note that SDLC is a layer 2 network protocol in the SNA stack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_Data_Link_Control

3.) is what gets me... Why do you need to pay a college to get a piece of paper to enable someone to pay you for skills you otherwise posses?

You say you have skills. Everybody says that. Prove it.

Assume the interviewer doesn't have time for a multi-day interview in which your skills are tested. Maybe the employer lost the last person with equivalent skills, so a non-technical interviewer is trying to find a replacement person.

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

#276

Post by Avamander »

scarface74 wrote: post #231
sgift wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a bad rule back then, it is even worse now and it didn't even stand the test of time at Fog Creek (or Glitch, looks like they have renamed themselves), where they had to do it for FogBugz to finally leave Wasabi behind. I could go on about how Firefox ended up very well and not as the complete disaster that Joel predicted back then, but that's besides the point here, namely: There can be good reasons to rewrit…

So you don’t consider it a “complete disaster” that Netscape went from 80% marketshare to almost nothing overnight? Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.

Do elaborate how its even remotely Rust's fault that FF has lost its marketshare.

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

#277

Post by scarface74 »

Avamander wrote: post #276
scarface74 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don’t consider it a “complete disaster” that Netscape went from 80% marketshare to almost nothing overnight? Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.

Do elaborate how its even remotely Rust's fault that FF has lost its marketshare.

What does Rust have to do with anything? Joel’s article I referenced was about Netscape rewriting their browser during the browser wars over a decade ago instead of improving their existing browser to compete with IE.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #119
LeoTinnitus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

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

#279

Post by Avamander »

scarface74 wrote: post #277
Avamander wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do elaborate how its even remotely Rust's fault that FF has lost its marketshare.

What does Rust have to do with anything? Joel’s article I referenced was about Netscape rewriting their browser during the browser wars over a decade ago instead of improving their existing browser to compete with IE.

> Not to mention that currently their existence is almost entirely dependent on their competitor - Google.

You wrote this sentence, it talks about Firefox and implies something went wrong there?

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

#280

Post by jki275 »

jki275 wrote: post #270
dmurray wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually I didn't phrase that right. Anything else they want to pay the engineer they have to pay for out of pocket -- they can't charge the government for it.
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