COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It's had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there's over ...

Ventilators, retired doctors, N95 face masks — all have been in high demand from heads of state and U.S. governors, but now you can add COBOL programmers to that pandemic response list. That's right, ...

With states issuing pleas for volunteer coders, we set out to learn more about the woman-invented language powering the mainframe computers that process unemployment claims, and why there’s a shortage ...

In April 2020, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, stepped up to a microphone and told journalists that he was amazed the state still ran its unemployment system on COBOL — a 60-year-old programming ...

Under the last coronavirus stimulus package signed into law late last year, each state was responsible for implementing federal unemployment extensions for people who lost their jobs in the pandemic.

David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs — 343 million lines of ...

The COVID-19 outbreak in New Jersey has Gov. Phil Murphy on a search. A search for personal protective equipment for health care workers, medical volunteers — and coders fluent in COBOL, a computing ...

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Damian Dovarganes / AP The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed aging, inflexible computer systems at the heart of the U.S. economy — and a shortage of experts to fix the problem. This is slowing the ...

The COBOL skills gap is neither as extreme nor as straightforward as you might imagine. Here’s what companies can do to keep their COBOL systems running, and what would-be COBOL developers should know ...