And then there's this:

New Jersey desperately needs COBOL Programmers.

That’s what the State’s Governor, Phil Murphy, apparently meant today, when he said at a press conference that the State needed volunteers who with “Cobalt” computer skills to help fix 40-year-old-plus unemployment insurance systems that are currently overwhelmed as a result of COVID-19-related job losses.

COBOL, for those who are unfamiliar, is a computer language that is over 60 years old, and was once the staple of software development across industry and government. By the late 1980s, however, it had become sufficiently obsolete that many universities did not even include it in their computer science curricula. In fact, while there are certainly are COBOL systems still in use today, relatively few software developers under the age of 50 have ever seen, never mind written, even one line of COBOL. It is not surprising that even New Jersey’s 62-year old governor, who was an executive at Goldman Sachs for decades, had apparently not heard its name recently enough to remember it correctly.

COBOL’s heyday in the 1970s means that the majority of COBOL experts in America are likely well over 60 years old – making them significantly at risk for death or danger by COVID-19 – and probably a bit rusty at their former craft; many of them have likely not developed in COBOL since long before many of the readers of this article were born.

The danger of relying on COBOL despite its obsolescence is not a new issue.

Nearly a quarter century ago, in the mid to late 1990s, as the Y2K bug required updating of antiquated COBOL-based systems, many industry experts sounded the alarm that the supply of qualified COBOL programmers was quickly dwindling; at the time, some COBOL programmers even had to be hired out of retirement in order to carry out Y2K-related repairs. As a result of what was learned dealing with Y2K there was nearly universal industry-wide acceptance of the fact that the many still-remaining COBOL-based systems should be replaced as soon as practical before maintenance became a severe problem.

The rest of the article is at the link.