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Comment by JustARandomGuy | Hacker News Reader

From the article: * State unemployment agencies are notoriously underfunded*

And there’s the problem summarized in less than a single sentence. Yes, they need help, but it’s the same kind of “help” as in “I want a BMW but I only have a dollar, please help”

There would be a ton more COBOL coders if companies paid the equivalent of FANG companies - I say this as a former COBOL coder myself

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Leaving aside what they're willing to pay or not pay for COBOL developers, does anyone seriously believe that a bunch of developers can waltz into an old code base and speed it up by a large amount in a relevant timeframe? Which seems to be what these articles are at least implying.

The government doesn't know that. That's why they're calling it COBALT.

I honestly can't wait until all the old non tech people retire.

Do you think that new non tech people are better?

These New Jersey and elsewhere new COBOL jobs are all volunteer, they are not paid jobs?

I am curious about this as well. If we take this "volunteer" word being used in these articles at face value, it means these states are asking for people to work on their systems for free… you've got to be frickin' kidding me. It's such a preposterous idea that I can only believe that it must have been an error or misinterpretation at some level which has entered into and lingered in the news zeitgeist like a fart in the shower and that these states actually do intend to remunerate their contractors at a fair rate. Why else would anyone accept these contracts? Are there really people who are both experienced COBOL devs and such huge fans of the bureaucracy of their states that they'll serve them for free? If there really is any overlap on that Venn diagram, it must be quite small - and shame on every single one of them for devaluing themselves.

They might mean 'volunteer' like people 'volunteer' for the army in the US. you get paid, and get the tools provided, etc., but you're not going to be forced out of your current life and conscripted in to COBOL work.

It's a bad word though, because it creates these confusions. However, they might be at a max of existing COBOL 'full timers'. Who would 'volunteer' to leave their current dev roles to jump in to the NJ COBOL life? Might mean moving to NJ as well...

The NJ site actually asks if you plan to seek compensation and that compensation would have to comply with state procurement laws. So don’t expect boku $$$ for these jobs. They want freebies. There’s no shortage of COBOL devs just a shortage of people willing to pay for them or pay market rates.

https://form.jotform.com/200966530056150

Why aren’t we asking other government employees to volunteer for free?

NY pays everybody who does any sort of IT or software dev work a starting salary of $56K at the moment. I expect NJ would be similar. You think that is too much for current employees and not enough for prospective COBOL programmers? Explain further if you please.

I, for one, am glad that there are people out there willing to sacrifice their time and experience for the greater good. This is one of those “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” moments in time that will testify to the character of us all.

I remember reading some years ago that there are or were schools in India teaching COBOL because of the demand for maintenance programmers and the aging of US programmers who did that sort of thing in the 1970s. I wonder if that is still a thing.

They probably had their own Banking industry in mind. This was in Argentina so YMMV. Back in 2010 i had friends in university looking for internships and first jobs and COBOL was a real prospect. A friend took a deal with accenture where they would give you a 2 month-ish course and then send you to consult for banks. I remember the whole "COBOL devs are retiring! salaries are gonna be huge!" which was likely to be true for the agency's rate but didn't trickle down to coders, they used to make as much as the lower rung of IT (QA tester, etc). Later in life I worked at a bank and met the fabled close to retirement AS400/Cobol developer. He didn't make more than any ssr developer with a modern stack in demand.

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