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They should spend the money and have someone or company help convert the programs or pull the data out and remodel them for newer systems. Private financial companies did it during the pre Y2k frenzy. The problem with state govt is the pay is too low to be competitive. I took COBOL and C++ in college, COBOL is such a effing waste of time. It was backward and time consuming just to code a simple math formula. You spend hours just to do a simple function that is built into C++ libraries. It will probably take any programming team a year or more just to go in and recode to new language or system. The best thing to do is pull the data out, hire data modelers and have the data piped into new existing systems in the cloud. I know plenty of people that do that for a living making good money.
The governor's call for COBOL programming help has been fruitful, with several volunteers stepping up to help with maintaining the old mainframes.
"Someone called me the COBOL king, I'm not sure that was a compliment, but we've gotten a lot of folks who have raised their hands and said they know how to program in COBOL," Murphy said.
It might be easier to just write additional COBOL programs for the addon benefits. Have the outputs from the old system feed into the new program and have it print out checks and the additional files that feed into their accounting system, all using existing layouts.
They should spend the money and have someone or company help convert the programs or pull the data out and remodel them for newer systems. Private financial companies did it during the pre Y2k frenzy. The problem with state govt is the pay is too low to be competitive. I took COBOL and C++ in college, COBOL is such a effing waste of time. It was backward and time consuming just to code a simple math formula. You spend hours just to do a simple function that is built into C++ libraries. It will probably take any programming team a year or more just to go in and recode to new language or system. The best thing to do is pull the data out, hire data modelers and have the data piped into new existing systems in the cloud. I know plenty of people that do that for a living making good money.
They really have no incentive to do that because they have a monopoly on unemployment. It isn't like you can go to a competing agency or anyplace else for that matter to get your unemployment benefits. Even before COVID-19 I've seen complaints over the years of people having trouble accessing the system, and I got the impression they were taking it down for hours on Sundays. Maybe now after all this attention they will find the budget to fix it.
I find it very odd they have no emergency funds to use to get their problem fixed now. Even with the best of intentions, asking people to work for free is foolish and who knows what quality of skills they are going to get. A skilled paid software developer who never saw COBOL before could get up to speed on it soon enough, but I suspect that's not the big issue. From the articles it sounds like it is a capacity problem which is the server, not the COBOL unless it has limits hardcoded into the COBOL software.
LOL, I took a COBOL class in college, had to enter the program using punch cards and a card reader. LONG time ago. I wasnt aware it was still used. But upgrading costs money so....
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