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US CIO/CTO: Idea of Hiring COBOL Coders Laughable

Posted by Soulskill on from the lords-of-cobol-hear-my-prayers dept.

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."

10 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. a**? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You mean ass. No need for silly regular expressions.

  2. Good luck with that... by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sorry to re-post the same comment from another story, but in this case it seems very apropos:

    Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.

    For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.

    In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.

    The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.

    1. Re:Good luck with that... by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because governments care about accountability, and businesses care about efficiency.

      That's always the way in reasonably democratic governments. When you're spending the publics money they have a right to know how it is being spent, and to know it's not being wasted. The problem is that every time there's a fuckup a new layer of oversight gets added, to the point that you spend as much on accounting for spending as you do on spending.

      And because as we just saw with the 38 studios closing yesterday. People get really pissed when the government wastes their money.

    2. Re:Good luck with that... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Having worked at several large corporations, this doesn't really sound that alien. The government is really not much more than a really, really large corporation that can't fail. But large corporations are just as bad. This is how my favorite bureacratic mess worked:

      You can't just buy a laptop, first you have to get approval from IT that your laptop is due for refresh, then you have to get permission from finance that your laptop has been fully depreciated. Then, most times, you just have to accept whatever IT is peddling as the laptop for your job description (even if your actual job has nothing to do with your job description). On some occasions you may get an exemption, and be given a budget to procure a machine. Then you must deal with procurement, a group of vogons whose job it is to drive profit margin out of suppliers, joy out of life, and requirements out of your request. Deviation from this practice will be made to sound like corruption, as if Steve Jobs is giving you a piece of the action under the table. Then after your requirements have been rightsized, and your purchase request has been shopped around and value enhanced, an order will be placed for the laptop you probably didn't really want, but which you caused to be ordered.

      Up to this point, you have been maximizing shareholder potential and optimizing profits. This saved a lot of money didn't it? Next you will do a bit more of that, but mostly and indirectly comply (or at least so the corporate mouthpieces will tell you) with various federal regulations for taxes and record retention.

      It doesn't end there, the new laptop isn't yours, it belongs to the company. It will eventually find itself in the hands of your on-site IT guy, whose first job will be to install the corporate crapware-ridden image on your laptop. The image usually will be targeted towards your job description (again, your job description usually won't match your job, it was designed to keep US citizens from being hired in favor of H1-B's in most cases). It will have a virus scanner, but utility ends there. It will usually have some form of network backup that no matter what happens, you will never be able to use, some network stuff that will make it boot slow and give you access to machines you will never use, software push...etc. Then you must submit your old, depreciated laptop in to be destroyed. Granted you could probably use that machine as a spare webserver or a toy for your kid, it's probably broken in some way by now but can be made to work. But no, it must be destroyed. Not because of sensitive data of course, but because the tax code (apparently) says so. Upon having proof that your laptop was submitted for destruction, you will receive your new laptop. At that point you will of course immediately delete the corporate image, reimage with the corporate image required for your job description (or if you are lucky and don't need to interface with hardware tools much, you can install a clean image with a corporate VM), request to have your machine added to the correct domain, and set up network drives etc. for your actual job function. At that point you'll find that maybe your monitor is VGA and new laptop is DVI or HDMI only, or that the docking station they wouldn't let you order is incompatible with the new laptop, etc. This causes you to create new procurement steps, thus ensuring that group looks especially overwhelmed with work.

      Don't get me started if you need to get a machine in your datacenter with (*shudder* enterprise storage), you'd get more joy out of your year by crushing your balls under a hammer every day for a year. "Bugzilla? Does Oracle make that?". No. No Oracle does not, and if they did I wouldn't want it because it would work poorly.

    3. Re:Good luck with that... by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Good luck with that... by Ambassador+Kosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This does not actually sound much different then what it is like working with larger private sector companies. Where they do a focus group and take months to make simple decisions. From working with both government and large corporations I have not noticed any real difference in the time it takes to get things done or how much money is wasted they just do it in different areas. Small business though are a different matter, they are usually far far faster at making decisions and doing things.

      --
      Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD! :)
    5. Re:Good luck with that... by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Okay, let me explain the structure a little. That might clarify the issue for you. I'll use the problem of information assurance officer (IAO) as an example. These are the people that will shut down your computers because they have a concern, often without talking to you, and with no sense of risk/benefit trade-offs.

      (Joe programmer) - Guy working on project.

      (Jane first-line manager) - Joe's boss. The one whom we're debating whether or not she's a "good" manager.

      (Mordak) - Denier of Information Services. The IAO for Joe's and Jane's organization.

      (Michael Scott) - The lowest-level government operative who has the authority to balance Joe's project needs vs. Mordak's paranoia.

      The problem: Even though Mordak and Joe might be part of the same government agency, Michael Scott works in Washington, and has no clue that Joe can't get work done because of Mordak. There are 8 layers of org-chart between Joe and Michael Scott. And still 7 layers between Jane and Michael Scott.

      Result: Michael Scott will never hear about Joe's problems, until 75% of the people under Michael Scott have the same problem as Joe. And then, the day before Michael Scott takes action, he's promoted to some other job, and Joe goes back to square one.

      In a situation like this, there's basically nothing Jane can do to fix the problem, aside from running over Mordak in the parking lot. Which is tempting, but ultimately a poor choice and one to be avoided.

  3. Re:COBOL might be an awful, outdated language by Mabhatter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    COBOL is still around because the systems that use it only get rebooted every 10 years or so. People don't realize how much business and legal knowledge is locked up in these programs. In many cases it's more efficient to "screen scrape" than even attempt to get 15 years of collected business intelligence and regulation compliance exactly correct... And all that stuff is MOVING pieces that have to be adjusted every year because laws change.

    This is why company ERP conversions fail so spectacularly. Many company systems have a great deal of "tribal" knowledge from long-retired employees hard-coded by long-retired programmers.

  4. Re:Wrong priorities! by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is why government organizations should be kept to a minimum. In industry, when the deadwood has accumulated, either it gets cleared out or the company dies. In government, you just get a funding increase.

    I agree with the deadwood issue, but there are also some dynamics that favor having work done by government. The big one is that there's essentially no profit motive. In a well-functioning federal agency, all of the staff are encouraged to "do the right thing" for the people they serve, rather than maximize profit.

    Secondly, because it's harder to fire someone from the U.S. federal government than from a U.S. private company, employees may be more willing to report illegal activity, because there may be less fear of effective retribution. Although my confidence in this has been eroded in recent years by seeing less whistle-blower protection than I would have expected.

  5. Joke all you like by excelsior_gr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...