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?
Related Stories
IBM scrambles to find or train more COBOL programmers to help states:
The economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic have created a surge in demand for COBOL programmers. Last week, for example, the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to help fix problems with the software that runs the state's unemployment insurance system.
A new initiative from IBM seeks to connect states with experienced COBOL programmers—and to train a new generation of them.
"In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, our clients are facing unprecedented circumstances," an IBM press release says. Some states "are in need of additional programming skills to make changes to COBOL—a language that has been widely reported to have an estimated 220 billion lines of code being actively used today."
A new online forum, co-sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project, aims to connect COBOL programmers to people wanting to hire them.
At least this time they're offering to pay.
Previously:
COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response
The magazine Logic has an article about the durability of COBOL, which has been reliably running mission critical systems for over 60 years.
At the time of this writing, in July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 133,000 people in the United States. The dead are disproportionately Black and Latinx people and those who were unable, or not allowed by their employers, to work remotely. During the pandemic, we've seen[...] some of the infrastructure that runs the social safety net break down under an increasing load. This includes state unemployment systems that pay workers the benefits they've contributed to for decades through taxes. In a global pandemic, being able to work from home, to quit and live on savings, or to be laid off and draw unemployment benefits has literally become a matter of life and death.
The cracks in our technological infrastructure became painfully evident in the spring, as US corporations responded to the pandemic by laying off more and more workers. So many people had to file for unemployment at once that computerized unemployment claim systems started to malfunction. Around the country, phone lines jammed, websites crashed, and millions of people faced the possibility of not being able to pay for rent, medicine, or food.
As the catastrophe unfolded, several state governments blamed it on aged, supposedly obsolete computer systems written in COBOL, a programming language that originated in the late 1950s. At least a dozen state unemployment systems still run on this sixty-one-year-old language, including ones that help administer funds of a billion dollars or more in California, Colorado, and New Jersey. When the deluge of unemployment claims hit, the havoc it seemed to wreak on COBOL systems was so widespread that many states apparently didn't have enough programmers to repair the damage; the governor of New Jersey even publicly pleaded for the help of volunteers who knew the language.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:05AM
Not with these magical fingers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:09AM (17 children)
They want a volunteer?
I'd do it, but not for free and considering most people with these skills are dropping like flies being in the highest risk group and all, they better pay really, really well.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:14AM (15 children)
Not only that, but it's working on-site in New Jersey, which is by far one of the most environmentally and culturally disgusting states in America.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:43AM (5 children)
Yeah, the license plates are way behind the times. NJ was the Garden State, but has become the Garbage State. There are still a few pretty spots in the state, but it's all way overpopulated. Kinda like Cal, come to think of it.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:55AM (3 children)
Like many, I did a contract job in New Jersey. And like many, I'll say "fool me once, shame on me ..." What a dump.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:14AM (2 children)
It isn't as big a dump since you left.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @04:50AM (1 child)
At least she found way to leave the world a better place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @07:39PM
it's a dude, man!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:09AM
Change the plates to "Birthplace of Unix".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:00AM (1 child)
Not as disgusting as EF.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:19AM
EF's just ahead of the curve.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 07 2020, @02:47AM (5 children)
-1 Utterly ignorant.
Obviously, you've never been to NJ, or if you have, you were only there to go in or out of the Newark airport. Yes, if that's the only part of NJ you've seen, it's understandable why you'd think this way, but it's ridiculous. NJ isn't that small a state.
Speaking from personal experience (I lived there for 2 years), there's a reason it's called the "garden state". It's really beautiful. The western part, in particular, is very pretty. Of course, this is pretty far from NYC and all the industrialized areas. Also, many of the townships are very quaint and pretty. And there's a bunch of really great parks there too.
Of course, there's some pretty bad parts of the state too. Newark is pretty ugly, and pretty dangerous too. Elizabeth isn't very pretty either. In fact, a lot of the stuff in that sector of the state isn't very pretty: it's been industrialized for well over a century, it's close to NYC, and a lot of stuff is just plain old, and a lot of it is looking pretty decrepit. But again, that's only one smallish part of the state. Just stay away from those burnt-out industrial areas near Newark, and check out the other parts. Except Camden; that place has a bad reputation too.
Anyway, yes, certain cities with high crime rates are probably places to avoid. But there's a lot more to the state than those places.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday April 07 2020, @04:23AM (2 children)
Maybe so, but it's been long known in industry that NJ has more hazardous waste sites [wikipedia.org] in need of Superfund cleanup than any other state. Look at the map, the whole damn state is red.
What's on top may look pretty, but what's underneath is gross.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:03PM
Sounds like my ex.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:28PM
Again, you're conflating totally different parts of the state. Are you going to trash California because of problems in the Bay Area? What exactly do the Joshua Tree or Death Valley national parks have to do with the idiotic NIMBYism in SanFran? Nothing. Nor do the local politics of Eureka or Redding have anything to do with that city. More similar to your point, another really hazardous place is the Hanford Site in Benton county, Washington. Are you going to try to tell me that everything around the Puget Sound is somehow bad because of this? Sure, there's a lot of superfund sites in NJ, just like much of the northeast. You probably don't want to live next door to a superfund site, but living 100 miles away isn't unsafe; polluted sites don't somehow contaminate everything that distant. There's superfund sites in every state.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:00AM (1 child)
I saw a lot of the outdoors in New Jersey.
But, it was Fort Dix and for basic training.
My opinion may be biased due to that.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:20PM
Well, that's much farther south than the stuff in the northwest part of the state where I spent some time. Also, generally speaking, areas in and around military bases are generally always awful, everyone in the country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:40AM
Coming from you, that is a compliment.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday April 07 2020, @01:30AM
Maybe they're thinking that since many (most?) COBOL programmers would be older and more at risk for dying from Covid-19, they'll gladly help on the chance they'll be saving their own butts.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:09AM (2 children)
I can see how the software might be a problem if they've hit some kind of integer limit, but I doubt 2 billion people have applied for unemployment, or that the system was only designed to accommodate 32768 applicants or some such. Maybe there's some cockamamie code in there that only accepts a certain number on a given day, but this sounds more like a scaling problem having to do with hardware, or bandwidth or something. Was this just people grasping at straws and bubbling that up to the governor, or perhaps somebody can clue me in to the scaling problems that would have to be resolved in software.
If it's just a matter of the system having a maximum throughput per hour, why not just hire data entry clerks and work 3 shifts 7 days a week? As an added bonus, the clerks wouldn't have to apply for unemployment.
Anyway, whether it's a coding problem, a hardware problem, or something you prefer to solve by failing over to paper for a while, PAY THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY DESERVE, sheesh. Why should highly valued professionals have to bail them out for nothing?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:13AM
Reread the quotes in a 'Jersey Shore' accent and then consider your question -- and perhaps rephrasing and reaccenting your response -- again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @05:38AM
I'll give you an example of a COBOL issue a friend of mine ran into at a place he consulted with had. They had an online banking system that did something through CGI. The problem is that the upper management decided to push online banking so that way they could charge money to the people who didn't switch. Now if you remember how the old CGI worked, it required one process per action. My understanding is that this process had to connect to a database and then submit whatever to the system that actually tried to do what was requested.
So what is the problem? Their license didn't allow more than a certain number of simultaneous database connections and only a certain amount of scaling in both directions. They pushed it for awhile, until they got busted in an audit. So they had to pay my friend's group a boat-ton of money to rewrite the program to allow each process to do multiple requests, in order to cut down on the connections and scaling. So they had to write a new system that had identical behavior and was bug-compatible with the decade-old, statically-compiled system with no syntax sugar, comments, documentation, or tests. The test suite alone took them at least a week of 12-hour days of reverse-engineering until they were confident in it enough to actually start on the program proper. I only remember that because my friend got his first day off since they started to celebrate and drowned the rest of the brain cells that the work hadn't.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:12AM (2 children)
I'm at a major university in CA. Everyone is highly paid with fancy titles.... but nobody can do anything. They need everything done for them - volunteers (aka low paid grad students) required to figure out how to do things, come up with fresh ideas and then write it up in suitable form for 5 Professors to add them name on to get credit and get promoted to Senior Vice Leadership Provost Executive Director Chairman Officer.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:19AM (1 child)
The UC system is run by Jews and the CSU system is run by Chinks -- so what you posted should anger people, but it should surprise nobody. The real danger with those two demographics is that they're subverting and pillaging the entire country rather than just their respective education systems.
Hell in the banking industry you still have 92 year old incontinent and drooling Jews working in industry "managing accounts" while their assistants not only manage their accounts and speak for them at lunches but change their diapers and mop the drool from their chins. And with that line of reasoning, I for one am wondering who is writing Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "opinions."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:31AM
A necromancer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:18AM (2 children)
Rewrite your code in Javascript and host it on AWS.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:40AM (1 child)
They'll have the same problem in T+50 years. The young 20 year old hotshots now will be picking over that shitty Javascript running on a i7 emulator bitching that they could do it with a 1-liner in a modern language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @02:47AM
There nothing wrong with COBOL code. It is these damn bomber haters We built the world with coding skills. Bomber haters can only see a pretty app that steal your information, built on top of the decades of work by the boomers.
So stop hating the builders and learn to get your hands dirty.
It use to mean to find a hacker, was open the computer and look for arms and legs. Now it freezes nd the guy that cannot even build an ALU.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:38AM (3 children)
As others have suggested, this is probably not a COBOL problem.
This is a MANAGEMENT problem.
Someone decided to terminate everyone responsible for the system, and save money. Find that person and terminate them. We would all appreciate it - particularly if they were promoted as a result.
So, that's just great! Now I'm going to be besieged by incoherent Indian recruiters who will spam the entire North American continent trying to persuade me and people like me to relocate, temporarily, for a few weeks or months, to New Jersey. When I ask them about per diem, and a car rental, they will quit talking to me and look for someone dumber.
Anyone recruited by such people will probably quit a few weeks into the project, after their motel room gets burgled while they are at work - again - leaving New Jersey's unemployment infrastructure, tits up[1]. Again. Six months from now we'll be reading about how New Jersey's unemployment infrastructure is STILL tits up[1]; and how, now, they are looking for Linux professionals to port the legacy system that they should have ported in 1990. Date of completion: Spring 2021.
Why not just hire someone and give them job security? Or is that too 20th Century?
When *I* manage infrastructures, I know everything there is to know about my machines, and it's documented where others can see it, too. When I manage people, every single element of our infrastructure has AT LEAST two people listed as contacts and I expect them to know everything there is to know about their machines.
~childo
[1] Tip o' the hat to my old boss, Bill Putney, for a colorful phrase that, he said, he learned, growing up on a pig farm.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:45AM
> This is a MANAGEMENT problem.
And the solution is.... more management! Layers of it to ensure compliance and give the sucker(s) at the bottom more motivation.
(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday April 07 2020, @12:52AM
Would you believe them if they offer a "job security"? It's a seniority at government jobs.
So, I can do it, but I want $500K sign up tax free bonus.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fadrian on Tuesday April 07 2020, @02:39AM
Someone decided to terminate everyone responsible for the system, and save money. Find that person and terminate them. We would all appreciate it...
You're being too optimistic, if you want a head. No one got terminated, just shuffled - it's government, after all. Every manager knows how to get rid of staff via attrition and unpleasantness so that THERE ARE NO FINGERPRINTS! Start with a strategic plan to minimize the number of headcount on the obsolete system - it will be signed off on all the way up. Make sure that everyone knows that working on the obsolete system is career death for anyone who might be there and somehow might find a job outside government later. Move them to the shitty offices. Make sure they get no training. Let normal attrition take care of the rest. Of course make sure to budget for a replacement system (the funding for which will be cut year after year). AGAIN, AVOID THE FINGERPRINTS! Most of the time, it will be seen as a positive and you'll be moved up before anyone figures out what's happening with the old, but essential system. It's really pretty simple, if you think about it a bit.
That is all.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by progo on Tuesday April 07 2020, @02:51AM
The quote in the news story implies the government wants 'Cobalt' programmers to volunteer to work for free. I can't find an actual job ad anywhere -- I checked their 'COVID-19 jobs' portal. The public pitch didn't say who to contact.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday April 07 2020, @04:03AM (4 children)
Well, the situation itself is a perfect example of both a decadent work culture and a faulty crowd logic:
There are 362 000 fresh unemployed people around and no dozen or one of them is able enough to learn COBOL to fix the problem?
What do they all expect to receive from a collapsed state administrative?
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rob_on_earth on Tuesday April 07 2020, @09:41AM (3 children)
I did COBOL for a year+ as part of Computer studies back in the 90s.
It is not difficult! YOU JUST PUT EVERYTHING IN CAPS
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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @11:48AM (1 child)
If NJ is anything like PA, they're not even looking at American citizens for programming work. Even if they were, it's certainly not full time with benefits or an acceptable contract rate. No matter how much boatloads of Indian contractors cost us again and again and again, management WILL NOT change its tactics because it WILL NOT be held accountable for these endless fuckups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:51PM
The managers in the US don't realize they are dealing with the managers in India. Both selling eachother and looking to maximize their cut and leave someone else on the hook.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @06:44PM
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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:04AM (2 children)
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.
Oh, and it's because I get to be "hero" by doing it in a place with a massively higher amount of COVID 19 infections than the rural area I'm in.
Sounds great. Lemme get back to you on that in a couple of centuries.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Common Joe on Tuesday April 07 2020, @05:15AM (1 child)
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.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @03:54PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 07 2020, @07:43PM
don't resuscitate, smash the state!