6.6 million jobless claims.

[kluurs]

It's HUGE. The old new normal is about to be replaced by a new-new normal.

[Axtremus]

Employment statistics released 2020-04-09:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/09/weekly-jobless-claims-report.html

• 6.6 million Americans filing first-time unemployment claims last week
• total claims over the past three weeks now exceed 16 million

It's probably still an undercount because many states' systems cannot take in new unemployment claims fast enough.

[Mik]

My old skills are back in demand apparently. Most of these systems are still running COBOL.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html?utm_source=fbCNN&utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2020-04-08T21%3A28%3A05&fbclid=IwAR2DiOQC1ZjaVcE4Zr1ljCNOvXHKhF2zZqIvAgSrZ__kHbZt4OQdLEHv26g

[Copper]

I wonder if there will be any fraud.

[Copper]

@Mik said in 6.6 million jobless claims.:

My old skills are back in demand apparently. Most of these systems are still running COBOL.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-programmers-new-jersey-trnd/index.html?utm_source=fbCNN&utm_medium=social&utm_term=link&utm_content=2020-04-08T21%3A28%3A05&fbclid=IwAR2DiOQC1ZjaVcE4Zr1ljCNOvXHKhF2zZqIvAgSrZ__kHbZt4OQdLEHv26g

How long would it take to train a C (or name several other languages) programmer in COBOL? Maybe a couple hours, a day or two for the second string.

Assuming you don't have to get too deeply in BL and BLL cells.

[Aqua Letifer]

Python's better.

[Copper]

That depends.

[Mik]

Python does not run the world. COBOL does.

[Aqua Letifer]

@Mik No, but it does run big data and machine learning.

[Mik]

What do you mean by big data?

[Jolly]

@Axtremus said in 6.6 million jobless claims.:

Read somewhere just yesterday that 1 in 3 households have someone who has lost his job or has his pay (or hours) cut.

Meanwhile, farmers are having food crops rot in the field.

[Axtremus]

Very long time ago, I wrote COBOL programs.

[mark]

COBOL in school. Had a debugging contract job for a few months, but nothing since.

[Mik]

I was the best COBOL programmer I ever knew. My code was clean, structured, efficient and stable. If it went down unexpectedly there were always sufficient breadcrumb trails consistently in the same places where one could find out the where the program was and what data it was looking at. If I detected something wrong and had to abend the program there was always an explicit report in the run logs that told you exactly what happened on what input record or DB call, why it was bad and if possible what to do to fix it and finish the run. Those things are pretty easy to do if you set up the structure right the first time. Everyone loved supporting my stuff because it was so easy.

[Axtremus]

@Mik said in 6.6 million jobless claims.:

My code was clean, structured, efficient and stable.

This might be a fun game:

Provide examples of COBOL code that is not “structured.”

It seems to me the COBOL language specification makes it virtually impossible for any compilable COBOL code to not be structured. From time to time I see C programmers deliberately write obfuscated free-flowing C one-liners that do brilliant things. That does not seem possible with COBOL.

[Mik]

That's really more of an assembly language thing, if you want to do really slick stuff, at least for older languages. But I would contend that if it's obfuscated it's not brilliant. Just obfuscated. I've seen a lot of that in C and other more recent languages.

The whole point of COBOL is an spoken-language-like readability, the ability of the poor sap who comes after you to understand what you did and why. And I saw a whole lot of poorly written unstructured code that compiled and ran just fine...until it didn't. You did not want to be the guy who got called at 3 am to figure it out. I always contended that programmers like that should be taken out back and shot so they didn't go to work somewhere else.

[Copper]

I taught Basic COBOL, Advanced COBOL and Structured Techniques along with several other courses, in Kuwait, a long, long, long time ago.

Structured Techniques were a miracle of the early 70s endorsed by IBM. The best, all used Structured Techniques. It was certainly possible to not meet this standard.

[Copper]

This post is deleted!

[Mik]

Apparently there is no longer a shortage of COBOL programmers. IBM set up a site where they can register and be found easily. I registered yesterday afternoon and hundred more have done so since. Good thinking on IBM's part.

H/T to Big AL for alerting me to it.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-04-09-IBM-and-Open-Mainframe-Project-Mobilize-to-Connect-States-with-COBOL-Skills

[George K]

https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf

In the week ending April 18, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 4,427,000, a decrease of 810,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised down by 8,000 from 5,245,000 to 5,237,000. The 4-week moving average was 5,786,500, an increase of 280,000 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised down by 2,000 from 5,508,500 to 5,506,500.