North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient state computer system
inforum.com
inforum.com
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-new-H1B-130K-salary-requireme...
I see hitting wrong with hiring some Latvians. They have competent programmers.
Those wages would have gone up if the Latvians didn’t figure out this niche existed.
So many developing countries have and incredible about of opportunity in front of them just copying what the US did and our pays lots for. If I was born in any of them I’d look around at what the developed countries had that works without the usual awful gov meddling and do a top end offering of it for my country.
The great thing about programming is you can really think of anything and just do it (like wise with entrepreneurship). If you want to make money either exploit existing obvious underserved markets or build a new one with actual value creation people pay for.
The suckers in developing countries sit around waiting for their gov to figure everything out for them. They’ll be waiting their whole life until gov agencies catch on to value creation opportunities.
It’s always those who go out to look for it. Small businesses and whatnot used to be the for new immigrants to North America and largely is. But too much of the existing population forgot that and blame the past generations or gov or their culture pushing useless degrees instead of going out and trying to find opportunities themselves.
Wouldn't want someone working on a project if they haven't had a university course in the language, after all.
I wonder what language it is. I also wonder why the article went out of its way to avoid telling us.
As as a sibling commenter noted, its always COBOL in these types of stories.
Sure, the Governor might not know, but, you know, perhaps he can help put the journalists in contact with the relevant department head who might know, or who might know who knows.
Instead, we spent the first three paragraphs repeating various wordings of "Old system. Not paying enough for the expertise we need to bite in America. Hired some Latvians."
Being Governor is his first political office. I'm not saying he knows Cobol, but I'd bet he knows probably as much about it as most of us here do.
The PR angle on this stuff is weird... they can downplay incompetence by throwing the 1980s card, and razzle dazzle the ignorant audience of North Dakotan journalists and political types by unveiling the Latvians.
The Latvia angle is rich, because it isn’t India or China (bad political optics). In the public mind, Latvia is sort of like European Canada, except fewer moose and different hats.
End of the day, Latvia is exotic but also harmless.
It’s really weird to put in a press release that two contractors were hired and stress the Latvia angle. Me being the cynic I am about such matters assume that it’s a distraction from an actual story!
Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, then invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941, then the Soviet Union took it back in 1944. People who attracted the attention of the authorities in any way during those times didn't survive.
Sure, Cambodia, Armenia, etc. might be worse but very not Canada. Many people probably don't know that, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKIeD3RxRQ (animated history, ca. 8 min)
Seems like they just didn't want to pay a high wage and it was an easy excuse to look internationally. Not that's there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but the headline should be "North Dakota outsources white collar work to Eastern Europe, citing lack of local talent."
"NDIT is maintaining several customer systems that were written in the COBOL programming language. These are batch and on-line applications that run on our mainframe computer. Our direction is to phase out COBOL programs as systems are re-written in newer technologies."
"NATURAL is a fourth-generation programming language that NDIT runs on our mainframe computer and Linux environment. NATURAL applications can run in batch or on-line mode. Our direction is to phase out NATURAL programs as systems are re-written in newer technologies."
Edit (Additional Note): The University of Latvia seems to create content about both[2].
The image is actually HPE C7000 blade server chassis introduced in 2006
The systems described in the article store real data that would need to be migrated, which may be locked in uninterpretable binary formats read using binaries which can't be run on modern hardware.
After so much maintenance and improvement had been done on the compiled binary, the source code wouldn’t help even if you had it.
Lots of fun stories.
by H. Nester Porter
"State officials admitted recently that they chose to hire programmers from outside the U.S. because they could not find any American programmers willing to work for Latvian wages.
"They cited the recent example of New Jersey. In April of this year, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy said during a press conference that the state 'urgently' needed programmers with 'Cobalt' experience. Left out of many reports at the time was that the state was looking specifically for 'volunteers'.
"The United States' shortage of volunteer Cobol programmers is now a national crisis, according to some sources. Without a volunteer labor pool to draw from, state agencies are now being forced to pay small sums of money to developers from countries with significantly lower costs of living.
"One source, speaking off the record, said that state officials believe that domestic politics are contributing significantly to the shortage of free labor. Silicon Valley's abuse of H-1B labor was recently met with regulatory scrutiny, forcing some companies to treat foreign nationals like real people. Meanwhile, other American workers are increasingly making demands that companies and agencies would prefer not to offer, including a living wage. Some socialists have gone so far as to wonder aloud if it would be okay to ask for affordable health care.
"North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, speaking from his recently-renovated governor's residence, said, "There's just no need to pay Americans for work like this, not when we can save taxpayer money with international contractors."
"The governor's residence was newly constructed in 2015 for $4 million, and an additional $250,000 of oil and gas royalties were earmarked for further improvements this year."
Is Doug Burgum aware that not every american is rich and has well paying jobs?
>not when we can save taxpayer money with international contractors
So lets give away taxpayer money away from our communities?
We had a rash of these COBOL articles earlier in the pandemic due to the need to update unemployment systems - https://www.inputmag.com/tech/ibm-will-offer-free-cobol-trai... is agood link to review - but just to reiterate to anyone considering learning COBOL:
Don't do it if you want to maximize compensation. Do it only if you're interested in the language. COBOL is a interesting language that is unlike most, if not all modern languages. It's great if you want to stretch your brain and attack new challenges. But it will not increase your compensation. Most COBOL opportunities are in the public sector working on unemployment services, taxation, etc. Their compensation is unlikely to exceed $100K - you'd be much better off learning the bleeding edge technologies and solutions, grinding LeetCode, etc.
With that said, I learned COBOL early in my career and it is quite interesting - it's worth a poke at the Wikipedia page if you're interested in history.
I remember once being asked during an interview if I could program in RPG. Apparently, the job was at a coal mine in West Virginia. This would have been in the early 1980s, if memory serves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL
That eats COBOL and spits out C. I am surprised no one has written a eat cobol and spit out python/Java. I know it’s a weird-ish language that is meant to read like text. I guess it must be hard. Getting away from legacy code is no fun.