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Wednesday, 6 August 2008

COBOL programmers rebel ::

The New York Times reports In California, Retro-Tech Complicates Budget Woes:

“In 2003, my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task,” Mr. Chiang told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.”

David J. Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said using Cobol was roughly equivalent to having “a television with vacuum tubes.”

“There are no Cobol programmers around anymore,” Mr. Farber said. “They retired centuries ago.”

Mr. Farber said California was not alone in having out-of-date systems — or handy excuses.

“It’s old technology, and you can’t find a repairman who knows how to fix it,” he said. “It also a neat way of figuring how not to get your salary cut.”

I know COBOL. It’s probably one of the easier computer languages to learn (consider that in its day it tended to be taught it in community college and not 4-year universities).

What we seem to have in California is an IT bureaucracy that is rebelling against a relatively simple matter of programming because it would cut their own wages.

As an overburdened California taxpayer I’m tempted to say, fire the whole IT department and hire contract programmers from India. But this is as heavyhanded as Schwarzenegger’s cutting everyone to minimum wage. Really, there are big chunks of the budget that the state simply cannot afford (for example).

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