North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient state computer system

Re:North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient... by asperous on Monday December 28, 2020 @12:05AM (#25556838)

Yeah any experienced programmer could pick up Cobol and work on the project assuming its long enough in duration to be worth it. No college class is needed.

Seems like they just didn't want to pay a high wage and it was an easy excuse to look internationally. Not that's there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but the headline should be "North Dakota outsources white collar work to Eastern Europe, citing lack of local talent."

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Re:North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient... by andi999 on Monday December 28, 2020 @12:42AM (#25557011)

Cobol is easy, but usually you need to know the database and operating system as well (which is much more time consuming)

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Re:North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient... by baash05 on Monday December 28, 2020 @11:39PM (#25566787)

Any programmer could write in the syntax of cobol, but it's a very different way of thinking from c based languages. Stepping into an undocumented code base is killer, but one that is "un conventional". I'd wonder about the career path of someone stepping into this role would have. What's next?

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Re:North Dakota needed to hire Latvians to manage an ancient... by andi999 on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @02:13PM (#25573567)

Retirement?

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