Posted on 08/20/2020 7:44:40 AM PDT by 11th_VA
Bill Hinshaw's phone has been ringing off the hook lately.
From his home in Gainesville, Texas, which Hinshaw describes as "horse country," he runs a group called the COBOL Cowboys. It's an association of programmers who specialize in the Eisenhower-era computer language. Now their skills are in demand, thanks to the record number of people applying for unemployment benefits.
Many state unemployment systems run on COBOL, but lack the programmers needed to deal with the swell of applications. Like Hinshaw, 78, many COBOL programmers are older. In fact, there are more COBOL programmers in retirement than there are in IT departments right now.
Hinshaw, who keeps a roster of 350 IT veterans at the ready in case organizations have COBOL crises, said he's ready to deploy his Cowboys to help states now hunting for programmers who can speed up the processing of unemployment claims.
"Basically when COBOL Cowboys gets most of its calls it's on an urgent SOS," Hinshaw said.
Such a distress signal was sent by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy at a press conference earlier this month.
Beyond New Jersey, Connecticut and Kansas have also been trying to recruit old-school coders as a shortage of COBOL programmers bedevils state officials...
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
A riot.
Though not enough to undo Cuomo’s latest sabotage of his citizens for political purposes: turning down the $300 a week Trump has offered to the NYS unemployed—fully funded by the feds.
What cannot be forgotten:
CALCULATE NET_PAY EQUALS HOURS_WORKED TIMES HOURLY_PAY_RATE
Funny i couldn’t get a job 15 years ago and moved to the user side and managed a huge payment system. even certified as a java programmer. If i were to work for the state of PA i would probably sabotage all of their applications. put in time stops like the year 2000.
I learned BASIC, COBOL, RPG back in 1975.
I was a FORTRAN and ASSY programmer - retired now. Funniest piece of code I ever debugged had a comment, “You should never get here”
Shouldn't that be GROSS_PAY ?
Don't I wish someone in my payroll department had written that.
CICS baby...
Back in the 60s. Went from GMAP to COBOL whlle working for GE. We had another opportunity in the late 90s as we approached the year 2000. All those date fields with just two digits.
MINUS FED STATE LOCAL TAXES.
First programming job was doing Cobol.
Still writing RPG code on an iseries (AS400)...In an era where computers are obsolete in no time the AS400 is still being made since 1985? by IBM. Rock solid platform for REAL business computing.....
“Funniest piece of code I ever debugged had a comment, “You should never get here”.
The worst piece of code I had to maintain was given to me by a very ‘bright’ and clever programmer that used to modify OP codes in assembler.
You have to remember the mentality of an IT group that still uses COBOL.
The obviously are not amiable to change of any kind and are totally risk averse.
The first change to be made are get rid of those assholes. Then you may get some good ideas.
Actually that would be the COMPUTE command.
Takes me back. Just like keeping the old kids’ toys in the attic until they become collectors items, stubbornly sticking to old skills eventually pays off!
Whoever manages a COBOL shop is getting paid too much.
Don’t forget to invite ROSCOE.
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