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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

#71

Post by Zenst »

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…

Many generational skills die out. Your grandparents would make their own butter, bread, many things today that are not so common. Then more, many skills lost over time and fact we are still working out some historical things got created, you can imagine rosetta code sites being a good thing to keep alive for the future. http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code

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

#72

Post by xienze »

nodesocket wrote: post #24
commandlinefan wrote: post #7

Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.

I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private b…

> why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer?

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.

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

#73

Post by passer_byer »

wolco wrote: post #14
vikramkr wrote: post #4

How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help

Not too hard but a little unforgiving. JCL was harder to deal with.

This is the only book you need for JCL. Called, either the Brown-Blue book or Blue-Brown book.

https://www.amazon.com/System-370-Job-Control-Language/dp/04...

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

#74

Post by xienze »

ceejayoz wrote: post #47
nodesocket wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private b…

> Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? In many cases, it's literally not legal for them to do so. For example, at the Federal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Schedule_(US_civil_ser... (These restrictions don't tend to apply to hiring one via a contractor at $250-500k/year, though. Sigh.)

> These restrictions don't tend to apply to hiring one via a contractor at $250-500k/year, though.

They very well may have to go that route, i.e. some greybeard independent contractor that can name their price. It's a very limited skillset and God knows this ain't the kind of work that gets the super talented motivated.

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

#75

Post by Falkon1313 »

Twirrim wrote: post #53
BurningFrog wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't mean to brag, but I already sneer at 2020 code!

I've certainly found myself sneering at code I wrote just last week.

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

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

#76

Post by jedieaston »

spitfire wrote: post #42
bitwize wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of tests written for them. They are just manual tests written up on literal, actual TPS reports (TPS = Test Procedure Specification) to be executed by humans.

My god. Are you serious? TPS reports are real?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_report

And were widely used, at one point.

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

#77

Post by sigjuice »

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…

My way of learning and exploring something new (to me) is to ignore the bizarre and tedious system specific stuff that you mention. I have never even seen COBOL code before. Toy programs that I can easily run on my own computer are more than enough to satisfy my casual (and short-lived) curiosity.

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

#78

Post by Zenst »

vaidhy wrote: post #13

I 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…

Site standards would play a huge part, you can write code without using GOTO in COBOL fine, and some programmers loved JSP (Jackson Structured Programming), yet modifying that code would make things open to whoever modified it and so the nuances and quirks of the programmer play out and code that has had many years of evolving standards and programming styles can be a right nasty mess that always begs a rewrite but the budget is for the change and no time for the rewrite. So the legacy snowballs.

Hence not all code equal and the site standards and that history as well as knowing that can make an almighty difference.

Never had copybook issues with ICL or Honeywell BULL platforms ;). That would be an IBM thang, but then, is there anything else still running - probably.

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

#80

Post by perl4ever »

xienze wrote: post #72
nodesocket wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private b…

> why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? 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.

Conversely, if you would choose COBOL in response to being offered $150K, you might well be a worse hire than someone who would do it for $60K.
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