SoylentNews

owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

As millions of American workers have been thrown out of work by the Covid-19 pandemic and filed unemployment claims, many states’ computer systems have not been able to keep pace.

In early April, during his daily press conference related to the coronavirus crisis, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy made an appeal for volunteer programmers who know COBOL, the computer language on which the state’s unemployment benefits system operates.

“Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” Murphy said. “There’ll be lots of postmortems. and one of them on our list will be, how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?”

Original Submission