The COBOL problem

Actually it really doesn't. Hate to break the news to you but you know what else runs on COBOL? The global banking system. I am dead serious.

There is a reason it has been talked about for decades but never done. It is very expensive, and difficult, but with critical systems it is dangerous.

Good luck getting everyone to agree to probably millions in hardware, than decide on a new platform that every department has to standardize on. It was easy back in the day because COBOL was the only option.

It is also dangerous. Here in Canada we had one bank accidentally put through an update to their system that put through every pre-authorized payment on every customer's account through twice and overdrew the accounts of alot of people.

Imagine that happening or worse with every bank in the US.

Or oops, we lost 50 million SS payments because of a bug.

Nobody wants to risk being "that guy."

Or worse yet. Have a Cloudstrike and accidentally take down the entire system.


And believe it or not there are people in their 20s and 30s making very good money maintaining COBOL.

and he hired a bunch of probationary nuclear safety workers - then decided they needed to get some of them back

fired them on Thursday - decided they wanted them back Friday - but they couldn't email them...because...well..they wanted to send them an email and oops - fired employees can't access their old work email.

and while they are panicking - they forgot that they had their addresses on their applications. then the required them to fill out an emergency contact. then they required their address to mail their tax forms to. If they had insurance - the carriers had their address.

smh

Misunderstanding COBOL probably caused Musk's social security date confusion; probably the biggest DOGE mistake so far. Likely where his "billions" claim comes from.

In the social security data, the DOGE boys encountered a number of dates going back to 1875; thus implying that the people were 150 years old. And, in his unique mixture of arrogance and ignorance Musk assumed this was proof of fraud.

But Musk & the DOGE boys don't understand COBOL. If a date is unknown, many COBOL data sets use a zero to indicate missing data. And because the earliest date that COBOL can represent is May 20, 1875, that zero prints out as May 20, 1875. Importantly, every zero date shows that exact same value of May 20, 1875.

Of course only a few people understand enough about COBOL to know why May 20, 1875 keeps showing up. I certainly didn't know until yesterday.

Here's the funny bit: when Musk & the DOGE boys repeatedly encountered that same mysterious date, did they investigate why it kept showing up?? Did they do any checking?? No, they did not. Instead, they assumed fraud and announced it at a presidential press conference🤣😂😝🤣😂



See what I mean about the unique mixture of arrogance and ignorance???

It's not like the guy does not have a history of doing this. He fired nearly everyone at Twitter, before he realized he fired the people who were running it, so he started begging people to come back, and more than 2 years later, the service is still not working.

Yeah, but he is cutting out all that corruption and saving all that taxpayer money instead of going to parties... while he rakes in billions of dollars from the government.

Typical poor preparation by team tRUMP. It’ll get worse before it gets better.

Same with the nuke experts.