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  [2]Tom Maxwell
  18 hours ago

  Coronavirus

IBM will offer free COBOL training to address overloaded unemployment systems

  Many systems that process unemployment claims still run on a
  60-year-old programming language that barely any coders understand.
  Bettmann/Bettmann/Getty Images

  IBM is releasing a free training course next week to teach the
  60-year-old programming language COBOL to coders. It is also launching
  a [3]forum where those with knowledge of the language can be matched
  with companies in need of help maintaining their critical systems.

  The moves come in response to desperate pleas by state governors for
  anyone with knowledge of COBOL to volunteer their time to help keep
  unemployment systems functioning, a critical need as the coronavirus
  has resulted in an unprecedented surge in people being laid off and
  having to claim unemployment benefits.

  Time is of the essence — Governors from New Jersey and Connecticut to
  Kansas [4]have all said their systems for processing unemployment
  claims run on the outdated language. COBOL is fast, but was long ago
  supplanted by modern languages like Python and C that require far less
  code to perform the same tasks. Most fresh-faced programmers today
  simply aren't taught COBOL, so if a system breaks, or a state wants to
  re-engineer the application process to respond to today's higher than
  normal demand, they're stuck searching for older engineers willing to
  temporarily come out of retirement.

  "Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old," New Jersey
  Gov. Murphy [5]said over the weekend. "There'll be lots of postmortems
  and one of them on our list will be how did we get here where we
  literally needed COBOL programmers?" State unemployment agencies are
  notoriously underfunded, which is partly to blame for their systems
  being so out of date.

  The alternative — writing completely new software from scratch — would
  take time states don't have. The surge in layoffs and furloughs has
  pushed the U.S. unemployment rate to a record-breaking 13 percent, from
  4.4 percent only a month ago. Economists expect it to peak somewhere
  around 20 percent before the pandemic declines. As the situation
  continues to escalate, any delays with benefits could have serious
  consequences for many Americans.

  The situation is so bad that Congress has decided to give all
  unemployed workers a flat $600 extra per week in unemployment insurance
  payouts instead of adjusting their bonus as a percentage of lost wages,
  as they originally planned to. Why? Because coding a percentage in
  COBOL [6]would take an estimated five months.

  More public-private collaboration — New York [7]updated its own
  unemployment process yesterday in collaboration with Google so that
  filers no longer have to call the Department of Labor and verify their
  information after submitting an application. Now, instead, once an
  application is submitted the labor department will call filers back
  within 72 hours. The idea is that people will no longer have to sit by
  the phone until they're able to reach a representative.

  IBM says next month it will expand its COBOL training material to
  include a series of videos on online learning platforms like Coursera.
  Its [8]Talent Match portal is also being used to match programmers with
  companies or governmental organizations who need their help.

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References

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  2. https://www.inputmag.com/profile/tom-maxwell-19355739
  3. https://community.openmainframeproject.org/c/calling-all-cobol-programmers/15
  4. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
  5. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
  6. https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/new-jersey-unemployment-cobol-coronavirus.html
  7. https://www.inputmag.com/tech/new-york-has-launched-unemployment-site-built-in-partnership-with-google
  8. https://www.ibm.com/services/learning/R035159C60850Z79
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