COBOL experts wanted!

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getopt

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New Jersey officials vowed Saturday to speed up the processing of unemployment claims despite relying on a 40-year-old computer system that has been overwhelmed by the record number of requests due to the coronavirus crisis.

www.northjersey.com

NJ's 40-year-old system increases delays for unemployment checks amid coronavirus crisis

Jobless New Jerseyans have experienced heavy lag times while trying to collect unemployment checks partly due to a "clunky" 1980s computer system.
www.northjersey.com

Never change a running system.
 
Start looking in the nursing homes :oops: Seriously, the last guy I knew who was a COBOL maintainer was pushing 70, and that was 14 years ago. I am sure there are still people out there...
 
NY StateConnecticut is in the same boat:
www.nytimes.com

He Needs Jobless Benefits. He Was Told to Find a Fax Machine. (Published 2020)

Thousands of newly unemployed New Yorkers desperate to stay afloat are being frustrated by the state’s 1970s-era technology.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
The maximum weekly benefit in New York is $504 a week, compared with $631 in Connecticut, $713 in New Jersey and $823 in Massachusetts.
“New York’s benefits system is unusually stingy,”
Click to expand...

Stingy heck check out Virginia:
Weekly unemployment benefits in Virginia range from $54 to $378 per week
Click to expand...
 
I played with Gnu COBOL a few years ago, for one evening. I remembered enough to write functioning 50-line programs, and they actually compiled and ran. Didn't go to the basement to pull my old COBOL books out of the basement though, so it was very superficial.

One of the problems with COBOL environments (at least for me, in the old days when I was doing it) was that COBOL programs have to be closely integrated with databases. And that integration was different in every platform (this was before relational databases and SQL). So a lot of COBOL code was completely platform-specific. Obviously, this didn't apply to pure batch processing that used only input and output files (from deck of cards to printed documents, and perhaps another deck with database updates).
 
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This is not a programming language issue, but a management issue. Most companies work in project mode and a project has a beginning and an end. When a project is finished, its participants are dispatched on other projects.
However, the outcome of a project is a new asset, but because it is immaterial, nobody cares... Until the situation reminds everyone how important this asset is.

Businesses (and organizations) are driven by short-term consideration - you can deem yourself lucky if your management has a time horizon of a quarter. Now, add to that the fact that many important decisions are biased by corruption, you'll easily understand it's a miracle that our situation is not worse!
 
We have a suite of cobol applications inherited from a business that was taken over. They ran on SCO. We 'ported' them to RH Linux and they've been running ever since for about 8 years. No one wants to spend the time/money re-writing what works. Zero maintenance, zero bugs, it works, it will stay until it's no longer needed is my guess.

This happens a lot in business. It's not a bad thing.
 
It's so old, it's internal to the business and it works. What can I say?
(Oh, and also no one volunteers to maintain it less they get stuck with it... ;))
 
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