The State of New Jersey is issuing a call for COBOL Programmers. From Tom's Hardware:
New Jersey Pleas for COBOL Coders for 50-Year Old Mainframes Amid Coronavirus Crunch
The governor of New Jersey made a seemingly odd call for help last night: The state desperately needs COBOL programmers to revamp the software powering the 50-year old mainframes behind the state's unemployment system. That may seem surprising on the surface because COBOL debuted back in 1960 and mainframes ceded the leadership position to general-purpose x86 servers decades ago. However, these (sometimes) archaic systems still power much of the infrastructure behind governmental agencies, banks, and airlines.
The need comes as New Jersey struggles to process a staggering 1,600% increase in unemployment claims as the wave of coronavirus-spurred business closures comes crashing to shore. 1980's-era mainframes power new Jersey's unemployment system, so scaling operations up to handle the increased load requires programmers that mostly no longer exist. That presents a unique challenge as the state looks to pay out more than 362,000 unemployment claims filed over the last two weeks, half of which are unpaid, not to mention the continuing onslaught of new applications.
The state will have competition, though; Connecticut is already leading a joint project with three other states to recruit COBOL coders to overhaul its own aging mainframe infrastructure. None of these efforts will find easy success: COBOL is a dead language that hasn't been taught in most universities for decades, and the rare COBOL coders command anywhere from $55 to $85 an hour. As such, New Jersey is looking for volunteers, likely of the retired sort, to help solve its problems.
The idea that these systems are still running on such antique hardware simply boggles the mind. There comes a part where electrical components start to fail with age (here and here for starters) and many of these are simply not manufactured any more and because the failure is age-related, other pieces of NOS (New Old-Stock - items dating from the same period which are still in factory boxes having never been used) will suffer the same problems. At some point, they must migrate the software to a newer platform.
If someone wanted to quietly make a crap-ton of money, they could develop software which would read the COBOL code and issue commented code for the LAMP service stack. Not going to be as name-worthy as the next facebxxk but certain administrators for certain governments would pay whatever it took.
I especially love that they looking for volunteers - yeaaahhhh - like that is going to happen any time soon...
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