And they are asking for volunteers? Hell, my last contract they were billing me out at $180 an hour, my share was a pittance of that. Since I know both COBOL and Assembler forwards and backwards maybe $200 an hour for a three day work week, with hotel stay, meals and travel paid for. That might get me out of retirement.
Why Covid-19 has resulted in New Jersey desperately needing COBOL programmers
The coronavirus crisis has sparked all manner of unexpected consequences, including the Tokyo summer Olympics being postponed and auto insurers reaping extra profits
as people stay home. In New Jersey, it’s resulted in something that few
people outside that state’s tech department would have foreseen: a dire
need for COBOL coders.
Standing for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL initially made a splash
by giving coders a programming language that could work across the
proprietary computers of multiple manufacturers. That was in the early
1960s. After becoming a staple of mainframes, it eventually came to
represent dusty legacy code, including during the Y2K crisis 20 years ago. Despite this it’s still widely used to support many business systems, including ATMs and credit card networks, and the developers involved do need COBOL skills.
In
New Jersey, experts are now needed to fix COBOL-based unemployment
insurance systems that are overwhelmed due to pandemic-related job
losses. At a press conference yesterday, governor Phil Murphy asked for the help of volunteer coders who know how to work in COBOL.
Of course, as cyber-security expert Joseph Steinberg noted on his blog,
many such volunteers would likely be elderly, making them especially
vulnerable to Covid-19. Whether they would risk venturing out (or work
on a volunteer basis, for that matter) to fix creaky systems is an open
question.
Meanwhile, New Jersey residents are clamoring about delays on their unemployment claims. The state recently experienced a 1,600% increase in claims volume in a single week, said labor commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo during yesterday’s briefing
(video below, at 46:35), noting that “over the prior two weeks we saw
more than 362,000 people apply for unemployment as a result of this
public health emergency.”
He added, “We’ve made no secrets about the inflexibility of our legacy technology.”
This
piece has been updated to clarify that COBOL remains in wide use in
many systems today, despite being considered a legacy language.
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