California has a problem. Seems the governor and the legislature can’t agree on a budget. (That’s news?)

So Governator Schwarzenegger opted for an approach to try to force the issue. He decided to cut payroll.

He issued an order to temporarily reduce employee salaries to the federal minimum wage level. As Bill Snyder wrote, he tried to “cut (albeit temporarily) state employee salaries to the level of fry cooks at McDonald’s”. But wait. Seems that is impossible because state Controller John Chiang, (the Controller issues the checks) believe that all the COBOL programmers have died and that it is just impossible.

In 2003 my office tried to see if we could reconfigure our system to do such a task,” he told a State Senate committee on Monday. “And after 12 months, we stopped without a feasible solution.

Well, at least Bill Snyder knows a fairy tale when he hears one.

The story has been interpreted by the media (including the New York Times on Wednesday) to make it seem like COBOL is similar to ancient Egyptian, carved on stone walls and only read by priests in loin cloths or cloistered academics. In particular, the writer quoted some bozo at Carnegie Mellon University who likened COBOL to “a television with vacuum tubes,” and then said: “There are no COBOL programmers around anymore. They retired centuries ago.” Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Well, I don’t know about California, but this COBOL programmer is alive.

But Why in the world would you change the programs anyway?

Just write a quick and dirty file update to store the current payroll file, then update all the records with a new pay rate.

After the crisis, write a quick and dirty program to change it back to the stored value.

You don’t even need to know anything about COBOL.

Article:
weblog.infoworld.com/tech-bottom-line/archives/2008/08/calling_all_cob.html