well-temperedforum.groupee.net The Well-Tempered Forum Off Key Unemployment Claims Overwhelm State SystemsPage 1 2
Go | New | Find | Notify | Tools | Reply | |
| Unemployment Claims Overwhelm State Systems | Login/Join |
Has Achieved Nirvana |
| ||
|
Has Achieved Nirvana |
Filing for unemployment isn't gonna get any easier. New unemployment numbers out.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/0...s-claims-report.html
| |||
|
Minor Deity |
Yep. My brother sent me an article on how lots of states are looking for us dinosaurs that still know COBOL. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08...rZ__kHbZt4OQdLEHv26g
| |||
|
| Has Achieved Nirvana |
COBOL? Holy smokes. Though I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's really hard to pull the plug on those old legacy systems and I know of a lot of instances where new stuff was just built around them....
| |||
|
| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Maintenance costs money, and you get nothing visible for it. Updating software costs money, and you get no improvements for it. In a Reagan/Tea Party/Trump world, is it any surprise that we chronically underspend on such things? And that, eventually, it bites us in the a$$? | |||
|
| Minor Deity |
I don't care what language you write it in, it was never envisioned to require this level of utilization in such a short period of time. If you wrote every system to handle the worst case scenario all IT costs would go through the roof.
| |||
|
| Has Achieved Nirvana |
From the CNN article:
That's crazy. I started out life on the clearing and settlement side of the business; I'll bet there is still COBOL code using VSAM files floating around at my old workplace. We couldn't convince the membership to give us the money to pull the plug on it all. Not only were the systems old technology, they had been designed when the place only traded futures contracts on agricultural commodities. We went through all manner of contortions adding financial futures and options, and eventually even more complex instruments. No matter how much we tried to explain it, they viewed the project as having no visible payback. Having 90 clearing member firms, each with their own system, to integrate with didn't make it any easier.
| |||
|
| Minor Deity |
There's more than that. In larger systems many times documentation has been long lost, and often even reliable source code. In short they really don't know quite what it actually does, just that it works today. I can't tell you how many times I have seen particularly IBM be brought in to replace large systems and fail miserably at a cost of many, many millions of dollars. They have seen that too and it goes into the equation. The reason they still run COBOL is not always because they are cheap.
| |||
|
| Has Achieved Nirvana |
Sure. But it was also never envisioned that COBOL would be still in use decades later. Not really, except by those who understood that nobody wants to spend money on upkeep. | |||
|
| Serial origamist Has Achieved Nirvana  |
I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed that I actually know what VSAM stands for. I guess I'm a dinosaur. Funny thing: I wrote in at least ten different languages, and none of them was COBOL. Well, that's not totally true. I did write one very tiny COBOL program when I was at IBM because my boss told me to make sure the new COBOL compiler we'd just installed was working. I knew a lot of COBOL programmers who made a lot of money in the year leading up to January 1, 2000. I remember one programming class in college where the first thing the instructor said was "anyone who thinks they are going to pass this class must understand one thing: a MINIMUM of two lines of documentation for every line of code".
| |||
|
| Pinta & the Santa Maria Has Achieved Nirvana  |
Not when your overarching philosophies include: starve the beast; tax cuts; the government is the problem. | |||
|
| Minor Deity |
These are state systems, not federal, Nina.
| |||
|
| Has Achieved Nirvana |
I only worked in a couple of different shops, and they both had robust procedures for documenting systems and programs. A physical library where paper copies of the documentation, including program listings for the current and one prior version of every program in production. Formal weekly production turnover meetings where development, operations, and the DBAs all attended. I've heard about places where all they had was compiled code and no source. I can't imagine how to reverse engineer a system like that.
| |||
|
| Shut up and play your guitar! Minor Deity  |
It's called a re-write. lol | |||
|
Minor Deity |
Since the Internet became popular, we have learnt much about what “scalability” means when it comes to computing. Back when COBOL was state-of-the-art, not only the people managing those projects did not anticipate the scale of usage that we put on the system today, the conceptual understanding of scalability and the tools to deal with scalability were also very much less sophisticated than what we have today. From certain perspectives, it’s quite amazing that the old systems still work.
| |||
|
| Powered by Social Strata | Page 1 2 |
 | Please Wait. Your request is being processed... |
|
well-temperedforum.groupee.net The Well-Tempered Forum Off Key Unemployment Claims Overwhelm State Systems