Many US government and banking systems still use a 60-year-old COBOL, which makes it hard to find programmers to fix the systems when they break under pressure
Retired engineers are coming to the rescue — ver the weekend, New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, made an unusual public plea during …
OneZeroDave Gershgorn
Context & Ripple Effects
The warning shot came years ago: coverage in 2017 flagged that dwindling COBOL expertise was already a worry for the US financial infrastructure that still runs on the language. When [[a:952046|more than three million people filed unemployment claims in a single week in late March 2020]], those decades-old state systems buckled under load they were never sized for.
New Jersey governor Phil Murphy's public plea for retired COBOL programmers is the crisis going from industry concern to gubernatorial announcement — and it drew an immediate supply-side answer from IBM, which within days announced a free COBOL course and forum aimed at exactly this shortage.
First-order effects
States running overwhelmed unemployment systems, New Jersey foremost, are now recruiting retired engineers as stopgap maintenance staff because their active workforces lack the language skills to fix crashes.
Second-order effects
IBM's free training push signals that vendors see a market opening in legacy-system support, while banks and financial firms sharing the same COBOL dependency face competing demand for the same tiny pool of experts.
Third-order effects
The pattern points toward forced modernization on crisis timelines — and the later report that DOGE aimed to migrate Social Security off COBOL in months shows the risk of rushing it, since hasty rewrites can threaten system integrity more than the aging code itself.
The trend: Critical US government and banking infrastructure built on COBOL is being maintained by a shrinking, retiring workforce, pushing agencies toward either emergency retraining or high-risk rapid migrations when systems break.
Great article. But the shocking part isn't that COBOL programmers are still needed, it's that these states and corporations let them all go, when they still had a huge investment in systems that ran COBOL programs. https://twitter.com/...
The persistence of COBOL (and lack of open source versions of it that programmers might have learned in the interim) is one remnant of the years when IBM utterly dominated computing https://twitter.com/...
Despite its age and that many programmers have moved onto C and Java, COBOL is still a widely used programming language. Today, nearly half the world's banking systems run on it, per Reuters, and more than 80% of card-based transactions use the code. http://read.medium.com/7QgPLv…
We're expected to react with “Wow, those crazy old bureaucratic behemoths sure are slow and stupid. They haven't changed in 60 years!” But look around at what's made today. You really want government systems to be shipping in beta and breaking with every update? Nahhhhh. https://…
Sent by my friend, Grover: Where to find employment if you're old and technologically antiquated right now in the midst of the virus: https://www.cnn.com/...
This is a good article but I object to the framing of it in this tweet: which unfortunately is all many will read. Instead: “Unlike most software built today, 60-year-old government computer infrastructure still works! But like all infrastructure it requires some maintenance.” ht…
“A sliver of hope, Scott says, is that COBOL [is easy] to learn... steel mills in Pittsburgh, ... would perform aptitude tests for workers on the floors of the mills. If they passed, they were sent to a two-week COBOL class at IBM and then put onto the job in the IT department.” …
Read this story today which validates my friend's view — Our Government Runs on a 60-Year-Old Coding Language, and Now It's Falling Apart https://onezero.medium.com/...
Beautiful. “The scarcity of COBOL programmers has led to increased interest in startups like COBOL Cowboys, made up of older, experienced programmers who have the know-how to operate these systems.” https://onezero.medium.com/...
COBOL isn't falling apart. Companies offshored its programming and upkeep to cut costs. They let go the people who knew it the best and now it's biting them in the ass. https://twitter.com/...
At the heart of NumPy is a Linear Algebra library (binary blob) originally written by LLNL so a lot of our data science also runs on a 60 yr old language FORTRAN. https://twitter.com/...
All technologies in the past they form a sedimentary layer of infrastructure. COBOL is the technological infrastructure of banking, insurance, finance, government because it just works, is reliable, compact & has never been hacked. The infrastructure works—we lack programmers. ht…
“Murphy's plea for COBOL engineers is also a sign that local, state, and federal governments have overwhelmingly failed to update their technologies to meet the needs of citizens” - @davegershgorn on what happens when we neglect the infrastructure of government, via @ozm https://…
A 40-year old system (literally bought in 1980) is neglected, not arcane. Imagine if we said we had to ground the planes because some airline only used 727's. If I were literally anyone; I'd be scratching my head at that logic. https://twitter.com/...
I can promise you that this: “Still, governments relying on a system too arcane for most working engineers can be perceived as a structural failure. ” is a giant insult to anyone that considers themselves an engineer. The author thinks that COBOL is too complex for you 😂 https://…
Everyone was shocked that NJ needed COBOL programmers: So I looked into the 60-year-old programming language, why it's so widely used, and who still writes it. Read it on @ozm: https://onezero.medium.com/...
Good story by @davegershgorn, & thread teasing out the components. A pedantic niggle with the headline: the US has local, state, & federal governmentS, all of which mix (wildly) heterogeneous legacy enterprise IT systems & consumer tech. The only “our government” is the US gov't.…
One of the overlooked stories in tech for years has been companies laying off older workers for cheaper young workers - it would seem those veteran programmers with COBOL knowledge would now be in demand by governments. https://twitter.com/...
pretty fascinating story about the decades-old, warhorse coding language that runs critical infrastructure like state unemployment systems, and the lack of coders who still know how to write its code https://onezero.medium.com/...