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posted by chromas on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the big-cobalt dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The governor of New Jersey has asked COBOL-capable coders to volunteer their skills as the State’s mainframe computers have struggled to cope with a surge of requests for benefits to help citizens through the coronavirus crisis.

COBOL - common business-oriented language - was first introduced in the early 1960s and achieved the then-important trick of offering programmers a language that could work across multiple manufacturers' proprietary computers.

[...] In his daily press briefing on April 4th, governor Phil Murphy said: “In our list of volunteers not only do we need health care workers but given the legacy systems we should add a page for cobalt [sic] computer skills, because that's what we're dealing with in these legacies.”

[...] It appears that New Jersey needs COBOL coders because its benefits system has choked on a surge of requests for unemployment payments.

[...] [C]ommissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Robert Asaro-Angelo explained that his agency has experienced a 1600 percent increase in its usual volume of requests for assistance.

[...] At Governor Murphy’s April 2nd briefing he said: “This morning the Department of Labor reported that over the past week more than 206,000 new claims for unemployment were filed, meaning that in just the past two weeks alone more than 362,000 residents have filed for unemployment. “

Does anybody know where he could find someone looking for work?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Common Joe on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:15AM (1 child)

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:15AM (#979896) Journal

    You screwed up monumentally and now you want me to "volunteer", presumably at my own expense or at least for free, to haul your sorry ass out of a hole you dug.

    This is, unfortunately, which I see as "business as usual" -- not just for state or federal governments, but businesses everywhere. Just this idea alone tells me they want to grind a programmer into the ground.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:54PM (#979984)

    Thats why God invented bailouts and made them sound like a good thing. About once or twice a decade, we put $2T on the credit card to make up for cutting everything to the bone and giving out bonuses.