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US CIO/CTO: Idea of Hiring COBOL Coders Laughable
theodp writes "If you're a COBOL programmer, you're apparently persona non grata in the eyes of the nation's Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers. Discussing new government technology initiatives at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video). Lest anyone think he was serious about hiring the old fogies, VanRoekel added: 'Trust me, we still have it in the Federal government, which is quite, quite scary.' So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.' Within 24 hours of VanRoekel's and Park's announcement, 600 people had applied to be Presidential Innovation Fellows."
You must not have a manager who cares about building your career, or maybe you aren't sufficiently motivated to move up. Might want to find a new boss or an injection of testosterone to get the juices flowing.
This is not something even a good boss can really solve for an employee. The fundamental issue, in my mind, is that the people who write, interpret, and enforce the bureaucracy's rules, will get beaten up only if the problem they're trying to prevent actually occurs. For example, a Section 508 compliance officer will get beaten up if they let someone buy a code analyzer that's not easily usable by someone who's color blind. Or an information assurance officer will get beaten up if there was any risk that a supposed vulnerability (even a false positive) went unpatched.
But those people get in no trouble if they (a) bring projects to their knees for lack of needed hardware/software, or (b) add weeks of delay to a project because they had a false-positive vulnerability report, which they "just to play it safe" take the project's source control server offline until the project members can prove that the vulnerability is in fact a false positive.
Working for the federal government can be awesome. I.e., keeping your fellow citizens safe in various ways is far more satisfying than is padding some CEO's excessive bonus. But between this bureaucratic crap, and having every Republican candidate for public office slander you to score political points, I'd say it's a wash at best.
You people can joke all you like about old languages.. I'm getting paid to use, maintain and write FORTRAN code.
In the past, I have written FOSS in FORTRAN and put it in the public domain. People still download it on a weekly basis.
FORTRAN has gone through 10 updates and code that was written on cardboard in the sixties can work together with OO code from last week.
FORTRAN is the back-end for the NumPy and SciPy numerical libraries. Python is just a fancy way of writing FORTRAN.
And, no, I'm not an old fart (yet), but I can chase you off my lawn nevertheless.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time...