Hacker News Reader

Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Schell said a college in Latvia still teaches a curriculum on this outdated programming language, so North Dakota opted to hire two Latvians to help manage and maintain the state's unemployment insurance mainframe.

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.

View on HN

It’s almost certainly COBOL with some shit sandwich front end put together circa 1998-2004.

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.

I'm not so sure about the Canada parallel: Canada has GDP per capita closer to the US, Latvia is much lower (but still much higher than Latin America and China so I'm not sure what other case would be similar).

I think they meant Latvians here are being portrayed as friendly or harmless like Canadians often are as well — not so much a reference to standard of living.

Sorry I was being a little tongue in cheek there!

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!

We went to Riga for the first time last year. What has stuck with me is going to the Museum of the Occupation [1] and spending some time there.

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.

[1] http://okupacijasmuzejs.lv/en/

The people had to suffer even more shit before that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKIeD3RxRQ (animated history, ca. 8 min)

Aside from the other comments about the NATURAL language, that time period is pretty much exactly when MicroFocus was releasing their new "COBOL for Windows" product, which I can see satisfying your "shit sandwich" prediction. :)

Yeah any experienced programmer could pick up Cobol and work on the project assuming its long enough in duration to be worth it. No college class is needed.

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."

Cobol is easy, but usually you need to know the database and operating system as well (which is much more time consuming)

Any programmer could write in the syntax of cobol, but it's a very different way of thinking from c based languages. Stepping into an undocumented code base is killer, but one that is "un conventional". I'd wonder about the career path of someone stepping into this role would have. What's next?

Retirement?

There was a very similar story (minus the Latvians) out of New Jersey a couple of months back, and it was COBOL.

As as a sibling commenter noted, its always COBOL in these types of stories.

Couldn't have been COBOL - India has a lot of COBOL programmers.

They don't say Latvia is the only place they could have looked, and North Dakota prioritizing European countries would not be surprising.

Probably cheaper to hire the Latvian from Latvia than bring either Indians from India or just already recently settled Indians in the tri state area (who are almost always pretty highly paid).

Its almost definitely COBOL right? That's always the langauge featured in this type of story.

Surely American colleges still teach COBOL?

We teach that it was a thing once. And that meteorologists still use it. The rest of my COBOL knowledge came from my dad :)

Why would meteorologists use COBOL? Wouldn't FORTRAN be more likely?

I can't find anything in Google, but if this was a game show and I had to guess, I'd say that the modeling is/was done in FORTRAN, but the reporting was done with COBOL.

Correction: I probably meant FORTRAN, thanks!

I graduated in Europe ten-ish years ago and even then I never came into contact with COBOL, and if the article is to be believed apparently there are a few more legacy systems here than in the US. I honestly doubt there are a lot of people under 40-50 who are proficient enough with these systems to work on government infrastructure

And what's wrong with hiring people over 40-50?

Children do not see difference between 40 and 90 year old. We are all the same to them.

I mentally chop adult age groups at 18, 21, 25, 40, 65, and 90. Within those groups, I don't really conceptualize any difference. Two clarifications: (1) this is talking about a single person, not a group, and (2) it's really more based on behavior than age; my grandma is in her eighties, but is so mentally sharp that I think of her in (the top end of) the 40-65 group.

absolutely nothing, that was not my point. But people in the industry with that kind of experience are likely already in a spot where taking a job like that is a step back career wise, which is why it isn't surprising that they need to go as far as Latvia to find workers.

Money. They have actual experience and won’t work for minimum wage. Not saying it’s a good reason, but that was probably the logic employed here.

They didn't at mine when I graduated 11 years ago. Can't imagine they've added it since then.

They did at mine 15 years ago. Two semesters of it. Ugh.

I wonder as well. I was thinking the submitter name might be a hint, but I know for sure that is still widely used globally.

Yes, I have worked with plenty of experienced engineers who would have no problem picking up a new language and spelunking through legacy code on a legacy operating system.

I think the article couldn't tell us because it seems as though it's reporting on a statement from the Governor, who probably doesn't know the language himself. (nor is it important for him to know, whoever he has on staff clearly explained the issue for him to get a grasp on it)

…and this is the problem I have with journalism today. They merely report the statements that people make about some topic. But if the people making the statement don't answer some question you the reader might have? Tough cookies.

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."

He probably does; he's got more tech credentials than every other major US politician. He founded a CRM company in the 90s, sold to Microsoft for $1billion, then worked as an executive there for multiple years (and was Satya Nadella's direct manager/mentor).

The Governor has a background in tech.

Burgum's not a typical pol when it comes to IT stuff, he was the CEO of Great Plains Software which Microsoft bought for $1.1 Billion, was then Senior Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions Group. Apparently he was also chairman of the board for Atlassian in 2012.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com