Highlights
COBOL remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world.
It is estimated $3 trillion in daily commerce flows through COBOL systems, while 95% of ATM swipes and 80% of in-person banking transactions rely on COBOL code.
when unemployment claims suddenly spiked due to the pandemic, these archaic systems could not keep up, which means that benefits are not being distributed.
The spike in unemployment claims exposed another new problem: there is no one around to repair these legacy systems.
Although a few universities still offer COBOL courses, the number of people studying it today is extremely small.
COBOL Cowboys’ business model is more akin to the gig economy rather than to that of the companies at which these industry veterans spent their careers. It is staffed with mostly older freelancers, everyone is an independent consultant, and there is no promise of any work. The company’s slogan is “not our first rodeo.”
“A lot of us want to spend time with our grandkids, but we also want to keep busy.”
Hinshaw was in contact with the state of New Jersey at the beginning of the current crisis, and quickly saw that the unemployment claims issue wasn’t a back-end problem. Every claim that was sent to the host (the back-end mainframe) was processed.
“They all have the same problem on the front end,” says Hinshaw, adding that these organizations’ Web sites were not designed to handle that kind of volume, while the back-end mainframes typically can.
IBM, which sold many of the mainframes on which COBOL systems run, has been scrambling to launch initiatives in order to meet the urgent need for COBOL programmers to address the overloaded unemployment systems.
While these measures should eventually help to alleviate the shortage in COBOL programming expertise, it is clear that the past approach of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” has contributed to the current problem.
Are you learning COBOL already? ;)
I don’t understand why they need COBOL programmers when it is a frontend load problem. Let some cheap Javascript guys write a new frontend with a cache.
Writing performant five nines scalable front end systems takes more than “some cheap Javascript guys” and a cache.
This would be private cloud k8s (systems engineering / dev ops / security), and maximum compatibility for any device (SSR + cache), and be able to serve native apps as well as web pages. For proper horizontal scaling there would be microservices for all sorts of things like authentication, user profile, transaction history etc.
Who said anything about “five nines”? All we know from the article:
A couple of hundred claims a week would be a lot in normal times, he says. When the coronavirus hit, millions of claims suddenly were being filed and hitting the front end, which could not handle the massive increase in volume.
I’d say it wouldn’t be that critical if was down half the time.
Not sure of these “millions of claims” were submitted within days, weeks, or months. So we have no clue about the volume. Maybe a single server would be fine. But who am I kidding, the cheap Javascript guys will probably build a distributed cloud monster anyways…
If uptime wasn’t critical then I doubt this article would have been written. A system needs to cater for its peaks not its averages.
The incredible irony of putting retired programmers to work through “uber for cobol freelancers” because every state’s unemployment system is overloaded.
