Needs a design-build contract, like the Highway 99 tunnel in Seattle. You get one set of money and only if it works in the end. No change orders or cost plus.
It's funny to see the viaduct replacement brought up as a success, but I guess if the state wasn't on the hook for the cost overruns it was probably a pretty good outcome, all things considered.
I'm still astonished we haven't yet been made to pay for that disaster. (Other than a billion more than fixing it would cost and with increased congestion...)
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…
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 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…
Or they, like many non-technical organizations, have no idea how to hire programmers. Could be worth a shot; even at regular companies they often over-state resume requirements.
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 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…
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.
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
The difference you're missing is we're still relying on COBOL, but we aren't relying on grandparents to make the butter and bread we eat lest we starve.
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
Here's a taste: https://qntm.org/zomg >System z is a living fossil; it is computing archaeology; computing palaeontology. System z is an example of the principle "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" carried to its logical extreme. System z and its predecessors haven't broken for forty-five years: the "z" stands for "zero downtime" and some of these machines have been running continuously for decades without a reboot. No…
> JCL does have subroutines ("procedures"), but get this: every line in a JCL proc has to have a label, and when you call a procedure, you can add extra lines below the procedure call to alter the contents of the procedure on a per-line basis.
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
The difference you're missing is we're still relying on COBOL, but we aren't relying on grandparents to make the butter and bread we eat lest we starve.
Not ideal, but it's not like it couldn't be migrated to another language and COBOL docs are readily available to at least understand the language. We would find a way.
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
The difference you're missing is we're still relying on COBOL, but we aren't relying on grandparents to make the butter and bread we eat lest we starve.
If you think of the butter as software running upon a compter and the process of manufacture the programming language, then you start to see it differently.
Though my main point I was making is that skills get lost over time for various reasons and how later you try to rediscover those skills for various reasons. I dare say that being able to make butter would be handy in some situations, imagine being isolated and access to a cow milk easily and your local shop not having any butter in stock for a while.