Legacy Systems are just as dangerous as COVID-19.

The most substantial test of leadership is adversity.  It is easy to look like a master of the university when everything is going well. We can only understand what kind of leaders we are when faced with failure and vulnerability.  Hardship and stress reveal systems' strengths and highlight glaring shortfalls.  One of the more interesting stories this week was a plea from the Governor of New Jersey to COBOL programmers to come out of retirement and fix the state’s antiquated unemployment system.  It is a story of benign neglect and poor leadership.

The computer languages COBOL, PASCAL, and Fortran were the first early languages used in computing.  From the 1950s to the early 1980s, these languages ran the large business, government, and academia computer centers.  With the explosion of personal computing, these old languages fell out of favor.  With the arrival of a publicly accessible internet, the industry saw newer languages like Java and C# take over the professional programming world.

The Y2K crisis was the last gasp of COBOL systems in banking and government.  These aging legacy systems had a glaring design flaw; they kept track of the year with two digits.  No one could confidently answer what would happen when the century ended, and the systems rolled over to the year “00.”  The Y2K bug created a frantic rush to patch and upgrade systems.  People paid COBOL developers ridiculous sums of money, and government, business, and academia were making a rush to avoid catastrophe.  Some of my first technology jobs were writing VB code to replace aging COBOL systems.

The frantic rush paid off with the millennium's arrival; no significant systems failed, and life proceeded as if nothing had happened.  The COBOL developers and the technology pros saved the day.  The reward was unemployment for the tech pros in the dot.com crash of 2000.  COBOL programmers were no longer necessary, so they were laid off, and many of them were not hired again because organizations felt they were over the hill.  I remember being in a job club with many people and swore I would never let my technology skills become obsolete.

The hard lesson I discovered during the interim between the September 11 attacks and my return to the job market was something people in government chose to ignore.  Legacy systems become obsolete, and the people who know how to maintain them retire. Schools do not educate people to work on these aging systems, so you are stuck with a difficult challenge.  Do you leave the system to become a ticking bomb, or do you go through the expensive and time-consuming process of upgrading?  Many people opted for the slogan, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  It was a great plan in the short term, but it sowed the seeds for a bitter harvest.

No one expected unemployment claims to be in the millions.  During our worst economic moments, the number of applications was barely over 500,000.  The COVID-19 outbreak changed that perception, and in New Jersey, the outdated unemployment system crashed, making it new to impossible to help people who needed it.  The schools were not teaching students how to program COBOL, and the only people who had experience were retired.  New Jersey has to patch its existing system and replace it with something more modern, which will not be cheap.  The reactive approach will cost money and time when we have them in limited supply.

The moral of the story is simple: Make sure all of your computer systems can be maintained. If a college graduate can not update them, it is time to replace or upgrade the system. Otherwise, you will wind up like the great state of New Jersey.

Until next time.