COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The governor of New Jersey has asked COBOL-capable coders to volunteer their skills as the State's mainframe computers have struggled to cope with a surge of requests for benefits to help citizens through the coronavirus crisis.
COBOL - common business-oriented language - was first introduced in the early 1960s and achieved the then-important trick of offering programmers a language that could work across multiple manufacturers' proprietary computers.
[...] In his daily press briefing on April 4th, governor Phil Murphy said: "In our list of volunteers not only do we need health care workers but given the legacy systems we should add a page for cobalt [sic] computer skills, because that's what we're dealing with in these legacies."
[...] It appears that New Jersey needs COBOL coders because its benefits system has choked on a surge of requests for unemployment payments.
[...] [C]ommissioner of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Robert Asaro-Angelo explained that his agency has experienced a 1600 percent increase in its usual volume of requests for assistance.
[...] At Governor Murphy's April 2nd briefing he said: "This morning the Department of Labor reported that over the past week more than 206,000 new claims for unemployment were filed, meaning that in just the past two weeks alone more than 362,000 residents have filed for unemployment. "
Does anybody know where he could find someone looking for work?
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