COBOL is operating for a number of practical reasons in the US.<p>Universities stopped training because it was not—glamorous.<p>Now NJ needs 100s of programmers—TODAY.
I'm a younger engineer, so I say this with a degree of humility, but is trying to modify these monstrous legacy systems on the fly during a worldwide catastrophe really the most responsible or intelligent solution? Is there no way to authorize some kind of emergency system built with modern tooling to offload the system burden and then process it later through the system of record? If I were trying to deal with this problem, my approach would be the following:<p>- Organize the legislature(s) to pass some kind of emergency act that gives protection around PCI compliance and that sort of thing to new engineering teams<p>- Hire business and technical experts, fast<p>- Build a system on AWS that can handle massive scale and start offloading the most important business functionality to that system (things like registering for aid, fraud prevention)<p>- when things begin to return to normal, start processing requests through the original system, deal with problems, whatever<p>I know all of this is not easy. Legal and compliance stuff is tough, and I know the domain itself must not exactly be simple. But this is an emergency, and it calls for emergency measures. Trying to hack your way through an ancient code base on the fly seems like it might be doomed to failure.
My dad, when I was in elementary school, started a small commercial janitorial business that he runs to this day, even though he’s mostly retired.<p>He always told me how it was helpful to have an unsexy but useful skill set, and basically do the work that nobody else wanted to do to ensure a long career.
>>needs 100's of programmers - TODAY<p>If you haven't done it already, please read Fred Brook's timeless classic 'The Mythic Man-Month' (1975)
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month</a><p>Nine women can't make a baby in one month - classic wisdom that should be understood by anyone trying to organize and plan (like a governor).
Generally speaking how long would it take to mobilize any competent senior software developer as a COBOL developer?<p>And could you imagine the DPA being invoked to govern what kind of _software_ output a company produces?<p>I know I'm being far fetched but I'm thinking about the hypothetical of the government just saying, "Apple, you're doing government payment software now. Here's your contact. Get to work."
In the YouTube clip, the URL <a href="http://covid19.nj.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://covid19.nj.gov/</a> but there is still as of yet no mention of COBOL as far as I can see.<p>If anyone has the actual links that include the job description, etc, I'd be curious.
Must not be willing to pay enough or be hard to work with. At the right price, 100 people should not be hard to find. Of course, they probably would not be in this position if they were willing to put money into the system or keep people on retainer at least.