Prediction:

New Jersey won't be able to hire COBOL programmers because the reason they still have COBOL in the first place is because a union controls who works on that system and mandates zero changes in order to keep jobs. The union will prevent the hiring.

And, if it's not a union then it's a small group of aging government employees who will do everything possible to stop anyone new from working on their code...just like a union.

I know this b/c I worked at the NYC DOC and they have the exact same situation.

The east coast governments are riddled with ancient VAX and OpenVMS COBOL systems because there are employees tied to these systems. Any money spent trying to improve them is wasted until those employees retire.

If Jersey wants to hire COBOL programmers I suggest this:

1. Promise the current workers coding the COBOL system immediate full early retirement if they can hire and train their replacements in 2 months.

2. Hire only full time government employees, NOT, contractor companies. Contractors will scam them hard, they always do.

3. Set a deadline of end of year 2020 to have the COBOL system totally replaced, and offer a $2 million dollar pooled bonus to any employees that can pull it off and that stay to pull it off. Those employees from #1 would still get their retirement, and sweet bonus.

4. Mandate that the whole system must use open source technology and not use any outside vendors unless that vendor is providing all their code open source. This is absolutely critical. The reason they're in this mess is because they use a closed dead system.

You ask, "But Zed, how will NJ pay for all of this?!"

When NYC hired consulting firms they would get teams of 5 people billed at $400/hour/person. On that team only 1 person could actually code and the other 5 were pads to boost the budget.

New York actually sued for this.

In addition to this, rather than just use simple technology, these 50 person consulting armies would be full of "software architects" who run out to buy the most complex things they can, usually from IBM and Oracle. Each of those then becomes a multi-million dollar project too.

When I worked there, I wiped out whole $million projects with cron and ftp. I'm really not joking. I literally fired up a cronjob that ran an ftp client to transfer data and wiped out a whole project. I did this to about 5 or 6 projects.

That's how you pay for all this.

If you don't use outside consulting, don't use outside vendor software, use open source (which is what many vendors used anyway, and is usually better), a project like this could save possibly $10-20 million dollars. Give the employees a cut and they'll work their ass off.

In addition to this, the COVID-19 crisis has a ton of top notch startup programmers looking for something more stable. If NJ is still using COBOL then *that's* a stable job. NJ could snatch up some top people right now, but only if they incentivize the old workers first.

Like, if I were NJ, I'd have contacted every former WeWork programmer I could and offered them this gig. That alone could probably fill the required positions.