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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

#281

Post by invalidOrTaken »

burfog wrote: post #275
godzillabrennus wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

I feel like this is a game of chicken that FAANG can win, but NJ Unemployment Office (or whatever) cannot.

The shortage isn't really cash. You could hire some bright high school students for cheap, and, given enough time, and half-supervision by an experienced dev (who doesn't even know COBOL), they could fix whatever bugs are ailing the system. You could hire a couple (again, COBOL-ignorant!) web devs at or above market rate, and they could also deliver a working system. It would take time, but they could do it.

The actual shortage is management. They don't have anyone who'd be confident fixing things if said high school students screwed up. They don't have backups, or don't know how they work. It's unlikely they know what actually needs to be done.

So what they actually need is a tech lead. But they think they just need "programmers," so they advertise for programmers (with inflated requirements, because they need them to actually be a lead) and the pay is commensurate for "programmers," rather than what they actually need.

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

#282

Post by scarface74 »

Avamander wrote: post #279
scarface74 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Joel’s article was about Netscape. Firefox was the ultimate result of Netscape trying to rewrite Netscape Navigator.

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

#283

Post by eru »

scarface74 wrote: post #204
eru wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You'd have to look at the marginal impacts.

You working for them would most likely not push them from failure to success. It would perhaps make success marginally more likely, or perhaps decrease schedule overruns slightly. Or perhaps make not much of a difference at all, depending on how screwed they are.

Of course, the estimate of impact also depends on how you value humans. If you value all humans fairly equally, then Americans who had a job until fairly recently (ie those eligible for unemployment insurance) are already fairly well off compared to the people who benefit from more malaria nets. Especially since their unemployment benefits would merely be delayed, not lost.

Lots of people value those closer to them higher. The most prominent example are family and friends. But valuing compatriots higher is fairly common as well.

Of course, you can give more than 10% of your income as well.

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

#284

Post by goto11 »

sgift wrote: post #215
scarface74 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Netscape went from the dominant browser to a negligible browser share. They basically handed the browser market to IE on a platter. They only rebounded somewhat because MS abandoned IE development altogether. And the result of the rewrite was not even that good, which can be seen from everybody else building on webkit rather than Mozilla.

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

#285

Post by goto11 »

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.

The article is about the disastrous complete rewrite of the Netscape browser. More recently Mozilla have rewritten some parts of their browser in Rust, but this time they are doing it incrementally.

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

#286

Post by DeusExMachina »

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.

This would work if we had only one problem to solve. Real people getting unemployment checks is an important problem for sure, but not the only one.

It's better to direct our limited resources to better porjects with a higher success rate and/or impact.

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

#287

Post by coribuci »

scarface74 wrote: post #202
robk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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?

Because the only thing they are specialized in is sucking tax money from the government.

> It’s not like HP is some unknown foreign company.

That's their only pedigree. In other countries they also took a lot of money and delivered crap. So people should be aware by now. But with all this corr^W lobby ...

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

#288

Post by coribuci »

scarface74 wrote: post #204
eru wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then why don't _you_ do it ?

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

#289

Post by pelliphant »

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…

dont really know anything about this particular case, but:

Isn't it common for job applications like this to state what they "want", even if they know that it doesn't exist? (such as 3 years of experience with an 1 year old product).

Then they just hire the person who gets the closest to what they want.

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

#290

Post by NikolaNovak »

xienze wrote: post #67
sigjuice wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apt search cobol found this. open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64 COBOL compiler Also, I was hoping to find COBOL on learnxinyminutes.com, but didn't :/

That's not really going to give you a taste for what it's like to "do" COBOL in a real-world scenario. Realistically, no one is running COBOL on a modern Linux. They're running it on something like z/OS and there is so much utterly bizarre and incredibly tedious stuff you have to deal with on those mainframe OS's that you'll run away screaming. And that's not even mentioning the code itself, written over several deca…

It is true that a lot of legacy COBOL apps are on mainframe.

However, not all - I've personally been dealing peripherally with COBOL on UNIX/Linux via IBM or MicroFocus compilers for decades - and it even works on Windows :-O

e.g.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/net-express-server...

https://www.ibm.com/ca-en/marketplace/cobol-compiler-aix

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