Micro-thoughts on the deterritorializing effects of COVID-19: COBOL and the home office

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. — Edsger W. Dijkstra

There is no more fitting metaphor for what we are seeing right now on a macro scale, than what we have seen at the micro with various state unemployment systems across the United States.

Some have accused decrepit COBOL applications running on virtual mainframes as having failed to cope with the surge in unemployment applications. This being the result of Coronaviruses’ rampage across the hospitality and service sectors. Although COBOL may well be a scapegoat, it is very telling about how much investment has been made in migrating legacy systems — in many areas none. As a result, there aren’t enough COBOL engineers to go around.

Demand for COBOL engineers is outstripping supply. As Michael Wirth, professor of computer science at University of Guelph, wrote in 2015, “The problem lies not with the legacy code [per-se], but with the lack of people qualified to maintain it.” — Slate: Why New Jersey’s Unemployment Insurance System Uses a 60-Year-Old Programming Language

We’ve seen the virus deleting traditions of the 20th Century as it goes, and the last vestiges of Atleeian security systems with it. Will COBOL fall victim too?

Many failed to learn the lessons of Y2K. Vast sums were spent patching legacy systems that post-2000 should have been on a route to technological migration. However, these Cambrian fruits have been left to wither on the vine. And the engineers that built them, subjected to the passages of time have retired from the workforce or passed onto the next realm.

To the chagrin of the Yang Gang a UBI isn’t sounding so bad now, is it? For the yearly cost of one COBOL engineer working to salvage the wreckages of the punch card era, how many could receive Yang bucks? 8, 9 or maybe 10?

If the unemployment system had collapsed and been replaced with UBI, would it have taken COBOL with it?

Working from home?

Beyond the realm of vintage coding challenges, other vestiges of the 20th Century are going through a vast deterritorializing effect. “Asses in seats”, that being showing up to the office just to be seen, has been proven to be the weak façade many knew it was.

Myriad companies have discovered that working from home (Zoom challenges aside) is not only feasible but preferable. It can reduce fixed capital overheads, and while more cash needs to be directed to digital infrastructure and information security, employees often start earlier (no miles of taillights to navigate at a sloth-like speed each morning) and are more productive.

Post-Viral onslaught, expect to see an acceleration in remote work and a rebound of the co-working spaces. Expect corporations to reduce office space to smaller well-appointed venues in major cities, as locations for showcases, those who truly wish to work there, and as meeting locales. This process had begun to take hold over the past decade, but the pace of changes will now pick up.

Who needs endless cube farms, when your own office at home is nicer than anything corporate logistics could have summoned up?