Day: April 9, 2020

CNN: Wanted: People who know a half century-old computer language so states can process unemployment claims.

I saw this and just about laughed myself stupid.

I thought, “New Jersey is going to have to check homeless camps, ask old bartenders, check with real estate agents, lawyers, and gas station attendants.”

That’s where most of the old COBOL or FORTRAN programmers ended up, all of whom were laid off in favor of H1B1s. Yep, a lot of those programmers were tossed aside like yesterday’s trash by businesses, and government back in the 80’s.

A lot of them moved on to other things and I know several that built lucrative businesses in other fields. For a while I had an Eye doctor that had been a COBOL programmer. He was making way better money as an eye doctor than he ever made as a programmer and the hours were better too.

He didn’t regret getting out of programming at all. Like most of us old school tech people, he’d gone through lay off, after lay off, and had “trained” his replacements at too many companies.

He went back to school after his last layoff, graduated and started his own practice. To do this, he lived in a leaky teardrop trailer for two years after cashing out everything he owned to pay for school. He wasn’t eligible for student loans because he’d made too much in his previous positions.

I know some real estate agents and a couple of patent attorneys as well. They were all great programmers and they were treated like shit.

They wouldn’t touch a programming job now. It brings back bitter memories for them to even talk about programming.

See, they loved what they were doing, they had their joy crushed and were considered disposable in favor of “cheap” labor. Many of them simply walked off the job rather than “train” their foreign replacements.

I say “train” because more often than not the foreign replacements weren’t up to snuff to begin with. Many of these folks couldn’t follow the code, so training was a pointless exercise.

Then I remembered Y2K and thought it’s been 20 years. Couldn’t these government entities be bothered to update the equipment and programs? 

Some of the COBOL guys did come back to rework Y2K systems and they charged frankly obscene amounts to do it. I’d heard that several paid off houses and cars loans with the money they earned from Y2K contracts.

Then I thought, “Who’s gonna test it?”

I went back to laughing.

I’m sorry that the people in need of unemployment benefits aren’t going to be helped it’s not fair to them. However, this brings into sharp relief, other problems “leaders” in business and government have been sweeping under the carpet for decades.

The chickens are coming home to roost.