Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response

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?

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 42 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @06:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @06:44PM (#980039)

    But seriously its just another programming language. I think we did it after Pascal before C.

    Isn't everyone a polyglot programmer these days any way?

    I studied it in college and turned in some damn fine apps, if I do say so myself. But what I never really learned was the whole mainframe ecosystem. I couldn't fine tune big iron w/ JCL and a database that maybe unlike anything the client/server market has. The db might be graph or network based and my not contain any SQL. I don't think it is a matter of a C/C++/Java guy walking in and saving the day.

    That being said, I don't think this is a software issue either. It is a throughput problem and they need to think about splitting the workload and parallelizing it. Not something but a mature mainframer could do.