1. Both have been around for decades, running behind the scenes.
2. Despite the addition of sleek, public-facing interfaces, behind the scenes both are still around and still going strong.
3. Elon Musk arrogantly presumed he knew how both of them worked, but never actually had a clue, leading him to make big, stupid, public fuck ups.
Some of you may remember waaaay back during the Before Time when a secret ally of democracy suddenly revealed itself to put a hurt on a Republican trying to do mischief.
The year was 2010.
The Republican was Ahnuld Schwarzenegger, who, believe it or not kids, for a minute was actually governor of Galivornia (official pronunciation during his tenure in that oviz.)
And the secret ally of democracy was...COBOL! Yay! My very own programming mother tongue!
Like the the Dead Men of Dunharrow, summoned by the last King of Gondor to turn the Battle of the Corsairs in The Return of the King, COBOL emerged from its hiding place to frustrate Ahnuld's plan to screw over government employees.
Twice!
I wrote about the Guvinator barking out his empty orders "zee bayroll zizdem being vixed now! Now! Now! And zo fort" here and we did a podcast about it here.
And now from the rotting carcass of the Party of Lincoln, a new and vastly more destructive villain has emerged. One who is attempting to bypass laws and courts by dispatching his Aqua Teen Incel Fascist Force to seize direct control of the government payroll system and cut off funding to whoever offends him.
And once again, Grace Hopper's Ghost Army of ten million lines of ancient B-XOR, END-INVOKE and 88-level number code -- some of which was probably last updated and compiled during the Carter administration -- have emerged from the shadows to kick Musk's Shitler Youth in their hairless yam sacks like an angry Mayan Codex with a black belt in taekwondo.
H/T to alert listener Ravi for passing this along. From Paul Krugman:
The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away.
As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,
I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.
For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)
So raise a glass to the inventor of COBOL -- navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper [December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992] -- was, by all accounts, a perfectly nice, brilliant nerd*, the likes of whom we could sure use more of these days, and exactly the sort of hero Tosspot Pete Hegseth would have run out of the Navy.
Old technology foils Schwarzenegger's wage order
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For the second time in two years, Schwarzenegger has ordered most state workers' pay cut to the federal minimum wage because lawmakers missed their deadline to fix the state's $19 billion budget deficit. The Legislature's failure to act has left the state without a spending plan as the new fiscal year begins.
Chiang cited Friday's ruling by the 3rd District Court of Appeals, which said "unfeasibility" would excuse him from complying with Schwarzenegger's minimum wage order. He said a fix to the state's computerized payroll system won't be ready until October 2012.
Meanwhile, more than 200,000 state workers remain in limbo about the size of their July paychecks while Chiang asks the court for guidance on how to proceed. If wages are indeed cut to $7.25 an hour, employees will be reimbursed once a budget is signed.
John Harrigan, who served as a division chief for the state's payroll services from 1980 to 2006, said upgrading the system would be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. He said it could be done, but not without violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act and substantially altering the payroll process.
"It's not something that you can take lightly and do overnight," said Harrigan, who also served as chief deputy controller from 2000 to 2002. "You have all the collective bargaining for civil servants and (state universities) that have to be taken into consideration. ... It's very complicated. It would take considerable effort."
The state's payroll system was designed more than 60 years ago and was last revamped in 1970, Hallye Jordan, state controller's office spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
A report by the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office said an overhaul of the state's computerized payroll system was proposed by the controller's office in 2004. A year later, the Legislature approved $130 million for the effort, called the 21st Century Project.
Work to complete the project has been postponed by the controller's office repeatedly over the past several years, said Lynelle Jolley, spokeswoman for the governor's Department of Personnel Administration.
"They had various setbacks that only they can explain," she said.
Harrigan said he was involved with the 21st Century Project when it was conceived in the late 1990s. He said the state fired the vendor executing the project in 2008 because the company went bankrupt.
As the project dragged on, the state has had fewer experts on hand who could thoroughly understand the programming languages used to design the system.
"There's been a knowledge loss with people retiring," Harrigan said.
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Schwarzenegger orders mass layoffs, unpaid furloughs
Union leaders for state employees vow to challenge the legality of the mandatory time off, which amounts to about a 9% pay cut according to the governor's finance department.
By Patrick McGreevy and Jordan Rau
December 20, 2008
Reporting from Sacramento -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Friday ordered mass layoffs and unpaid furloughs for state workers starting in February to address California's growing fiscal crisis.
Under his executive order, 238,000 employees will be forced to take off two unpaid days per month through June 30, 2010. Managers will receive either the furlough or an equivalent salary reduction during the same period.
H.D. Palmer, spokesman for Schwarzenegger's finance department, said the mandatory time off is the equivalent of about a 9% pay cut for affected workers. He said the furloughs would save the state more than $1.2 billion.
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Schwarzenegger attempted a few months ago to unilaterally reduce the pay of state employees, but his order never took effect. State Controller John Chiang said the state's payroll system was incapable of carrying it out.
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Schwarzenegger pay plans thwarted by COBOLOf course, no one with any grasp of the history of technology -- its dark secrets and strange mutations -- has any trouble believing that tech-muggles like Governor Schwarzenegger and 90% of the rest of the United States would think that fixing technical problems is as simple as yelling at them. After all, in the world most people see around them, Man has not only gone to the Moon, but has stopped because it was boring and expensive.
By Iain Thomson
7 August 2008 07:39AM
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to reduce all state employees pay to the minimum wage are being blocked because the payroll system is run on COBOL.
Schwarzenegger signed an executive order last week to cut the salary of the state’s 200,000 employees to the minimum wage until the state budget, currently 36 days behind schedule, is passed.
But State Controller John Chiang told the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization that this was impossible as the payroll system was written 30 years ago in COBOL and there weren’t enough programmers to do the job.
Chiang estimated that with current resources it would take six months to make the change, and then nine to ten months to reverse them.
"Pragmatically, we just can't get the system to work in a timely manner for us to implement payment of minimum wage," Chiang said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
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