A 60 Year-Old Computer Programming Language Called COBOL that Virtually No One Knows Anymore Is to Blame for the Current Unemployment Insurance Debacle

By now we all probably know at least one person who has been laid off or furloughed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and heard the horror stories from friends and relatives unable to reach the Unemployment Insurance Claims departments in NY State and around the country. People have called hundreds, even thousands of times only to be kept on hold for hours on end and then disconnected. In a time of crisis the system has failed.

What many don’t understand is  the reason why and it underscores how 50 some odd years of neglect of infrastructure and defunding investment in keeping up with the systems we use now. This has  resulted in the calamity now facing New Yorkers and Americans everywhere and  doesn’t bode well for the coming weeks and months ahead if the pandemic endures.

Much of the blame can be laid at the  on very old computer systems that run on a decades-old computer programming language known as COBOL. The acronym stands for Common Business-Oriented Language but is derisively referred  to as “Completely Obsolete Burdensome Old Language” by modern day computer programmers.

COBOL was invented in 1959.

The Daily News reports: Coders moved away from it by the ’80s, but COBOL still exists in plenty of banking and governmental systems, and there’s a need for those who understand it right now.  “The general population of COBOL programmers is generally much older than the average age of a coder,” Joseph Steinberg, an expert on cybersecurity, told CNN. “Many American universities have not taught COBOL in their computer science programs since the 1980s.”

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy put out a call for volunteer coders who know COBOL, as the state’s ancient mainframes try to handle over 350,000 unemployment applications in the last two weeks alone.

“Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” Murphy said. “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?”