What is not learned from the 2000 Effect: when a government desperately seeking programmers with COBOL in the middle of a pandemic

Some of you may not remember it, others might not even had been born, but the 2000 was a very real risk that almost leads the world to collapse. It was a bug in the computer systems caused by the format of the dates that were using, one that was always assumed that the year belonged to the TWENTIETH century. When he approached the year 2000 for the computers, the “00” refers to 1900. This would make that is basically all the computer systems would travel one hundred years into the past.

To solve the year 2000 or Y2K was required to update a lot of outdated systems based on COBOLa programming language that dates from the 50’s, because at that time it was little used and just a few programmers of old school driving. Today, in the year 2020, those obsolete systems that still use COBOL are still present in many places, and in the midst of this global pandemic caused by the COVID-19, are proving again to be a headache.

The desperate search for programmers COBOL

In the united States and in many other parts of the world, it is immense the amount of systems that still depend on COBOL, this graphic from Reuters shows as for 2015, that country still depends in huge percentages of systems based on COBOL for the majority of the operations of the financial industryis on all sides.

A couple of days ago, the governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, he explained during a press conference that are desperately looking for programmers COBOL volunteers who can help to solve the problems that are presenting their systems of social security for the unemployed.

The amount of people who have lost their jobs in recent weeks due to the crisis of the coronavirus is huge, in the united States the figures of those who have entered unemployment around 10 million. These people use automated systems to claim their social security payments and able to survive during the crisis.

The systems are failing and there are no programmers that know COBOL that can arregarlos. This is a sample of how the neglect in the maintenance of critical computer systems can have a real impact and devastating the lives of millions of people.

It’s been more than 20 years since 2000 to leave in evidence the problems to continue using legacy systems based on COBOL, a language that, for decades, not taught in any curriculum, for which almost no one talks, ever you will see a list of what you are looking for to learnthat is the end of the popularity lists and with which very few programmers are familiar with.

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What is not learned from the 2000 Effect: when a government desperately seeking programmers with COBOL in the middle of a pandemic

it was originally published in

Engadget

by
Gabriela Gonzalez

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