MULTIPLY JOBS BY COBOL GIVING IT-JOB-SECURITY.
Tim Finin, 10:50pm 5 August 2008Forget becoming a Pythonista or learning how to exploit the Semantic Web in social networking applications. Learn Cobol.
From today’s New York Times (In California, Retro-Tech Complicates Budget Woes), comes this note on how to avoid being an obsolete geek: be a Cobol hacker. The context is an emergency plan that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to deploy to address a $15 billion budget deficit.
“Last week, with no budget agreement in sight, the governor issued an executive order terminating thousands of part-time and temporary state employees and slashing the wages of about 170,000 of the state’s full-time workers to the federal minimum wage.
But the California controller, John Chiang, says the state’s payroll system — which uses a programming throwback known as Cobol, or Common Business-Oriented Language — is so antiquated it would take months to make the changes to workers’ checks.
“In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task,” Mr. Chiang told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”
David J. Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said using Cobol was roughly equivalent to having “a television with vacuum tubes.”
“There are no Cobol programmers around anymore,” Mr. Farber said. “They retired centuries ago.”
Try this Google search for Cobol programming assignments and see how many results are returned.
Ebiquity Blog
August 7th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
I think the California controller, John Chiang, may be wrong about the involvement needed to issue the minimum wage paychecks. If my understanding is correct, this is only a one time shot and then those effected will be paid the dfference later on. Most payroll systems allow for a payroll advance. If the workers were to receive a payroll advancefor the amount of the minimum wage, the payroll program should be able to handle that without any programming changes at all. I may require qite a bit of clerk time to make the entries, or someone cojuld write a quick program to provide the input.
As for no Cobol programmers out there any more, I think they are wrong. I retired from a Bank about 8 years ago and I saw no shortage of Cobol programmers then, and if we needed additional help, there were plenty of consulting firms around who could suplply more people as needed.