for programmers who have experience with COBOL — a programming language over 60 years old — to help the state deal with the coronavirus crisis-driven crush of unemployment claims flooding its decades-old mainframe systems.
Indeed, state governments , the military, and many banks never stopped using mainframes to run certain critical software. IBM says that its Z series of mainframes is in use at 70% of the Fortune 100. But as the cascade of unemployment system failures shows, COBOL doesn't always scale up to meet the needs of today.
"It's there to provide a language that can help with creating mission critical and core systems of record applications and databases," Baker told Business Insider. "It's definitely a business-focused language. You're not going to use it to create a webpage or fast-prototype something." "If I have a system that works, it's hard to justify allocating tens of millions of dollars to replace a system in order to have the same results in the short term," Steinberg said. "Do we have enough money for people to collect unemployment or replace the system? A lot of our politics is about thinking of short term benefits to taxpayers and to residents."
"We've got to do the work to create the pipeline and go do the recruiting," Baker said. "That's what we enable a lot of our clients to do. We're helping make sure they've got a steady stream of technical talent to work on these technologies."
COBOL = job security. Most of the original programmers are retired or dead.
So literally telling citizens it would be a great idea to learn to code lol.