The point at which the government should have rewritten their COBOL systems into a language that would have a talent pool to draw from was at least 30 years ago.
While there are problems with lowest-bidder-win, the real issue here is that systems like this are more living and breathing than one-off; you need a teams that tend to them, not bringing in a contractor.
It is, but you can't have any joe schmoe off the street coming in and learn how to pour concrete in a day. This is something that requires practice and problem solving skills. And years of it.
[1] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/major-concrete-issu...
Lack of foresight, lack of understanding that codebases are a living thing and are never "done". But hey, let's all work for ad companies and put our best minds at solving how we could make people see more ads!
Isn't it the power of the executive branch to requisition corporations or people in time of deep crisis in order maintain the continuity of government and its critical systems? Isn't unemployment claims such a critical system?
UI is mostly federally funded so they need to coordinate with them, and the complexity of the business rules and minimal funding during good times makes it a difficult task.
Also these systems generally work well, and it’s hard to fix things that aren’t broken. They just cannot handle the never before seen volume — it’s unlikely that a more modern enterprise system would either.
sorry but that is just false. a Properly designed modern system would handle horizontal scaling just fine.
Granted the government would likely pay a billion dollars to have a screwed up system developed by on of the "big guys" that has the same problems as they current system, most likely because it would be designed by committee and not by engineers.
However to say that modern systems could not handle this kind of problem is just wrong. There are all kinds of ways to handle a sudden increase in load.
If New Jersey landed a replacement UI system in 2010, it would be some sort of J2EE monstrosity on some outdated Websphere/JBoss/BEA/Oracle platform probably still dependent on some mainframe component.
The desperation for COBOL people is almost certainly because the (very complex) business rules are embedded in code that has been evolving for decades. Just changing anything is hard because it is a security nightmare (touches tax data, social security, dmv, and more) and regulated by all sorts of security/compliance frameworks that are difficult to implement and sometimes conflicting!
As the saying goes, Government: if you think you have problems just wait until you see our solutions
And this is a department that have billions.