#Cobol Programmer

[nixcraft]

A COBOL programmer, tired of the bug chaos in the legacy codebase, decides to have themselves cryogenically frozen to skip the whole mess. Years later, they're thawed out.

"Did I sleep through?" they ask.

"It's the year 9999," the scientists replied, "And we need you to fix some legacy code from 2000, which is still in production ."

[basic-retro-programming]

The true benefits of being a smart programmer ...

Source: Pinterest

Post #294: Romford & Guildford, ComputerAid Ltd., BAL 360 (Basic Assembly Language on the legendary IBM 360) And Cobol (Common Business-Oriented Language), We Are A Great Bunch Of Young People, 2024.

[saywhat-politics]

Elon Musk has repeatedly claimed that his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project had uncovered massive government fraud when it alleged that 150-year-olds were claiming Social Security benefits.

But Musk has provided no evidence to back up his claims, and experts quickly pointed out that this is very likely just a quirk of the decades-old coding language that underpins the government payment systems.

Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a “cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records … So that's a case where I think they're probably dead.”

While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets.

Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.

COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.

Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the "Convention du Mètre."

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.

That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115.

However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from “the Social Security database” to X, writing that “the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!”

[concertigrossi]

Operation Mincemeat Characters as IT People

I am painfully aware of how small the overlap is on the Venn diagram of Broadway Nerds and IT Nerds, so I'm not sure who else is going to get these jokes, hey, but it's my Tumblr, and I do what I want. :)

Charles Cholmondeley: That Linux Guy. You know, THAT one. Arch Linux Do or Die. Doesn't understand why people would use Microsoft Active Directory when OpenLDAP is so intuitive and logical.

Hester Leggatt: That one COBOL programmer who supplicants approach on bended knee when that one Too-Big-To-Fail-Or-Be-Taken-Offline application that the entire modern world has relied on since the late 1980s needs updating.

Jean Leslie: She is that most valuable of all creatures: a fast, efficient and effective coder who documents well and is a good team player. Has a massive fanbase on Stack Overflow thanks to her astonishingly useful submissions.

Johnny Bevan: Team manager, with no changes, really. Honestly, that is kind of what managing a team of IT people looks like, only with fewer dead bodies. (Most of the time.)

Ewen Montagu: Marketing Director. Took a bath when NFTs crashed, is now hyping AI.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

Just when you think the DOGE infection of our financial payments and other government systems can’t get worse, it just did. The New York Times reported that Elon Musk has embedded one of his teams inside the Social Security Administration, with all our personal financial information in its databases now likely available to them. It’s so bad that a top Social Security official resigned on Monday after DOGE sought access to personal data for millions of Americans. That sounds a lot like what happened inside of the Fiscal Services Bureau and USAID. Once inside our Social Security systems, Musk wasted no time spreading outright lies about 150-year old recipients and millions of dead people in the system—unsupported claims that were repeated by the White House and amplified by right-wing media outlets. We need to get him out, that much is clear to all sane persons. But to do this, we also need to call him out. Specifically, we need to expose his lies and why he’s making them. Musk made three big false claims about Social Security fraud, both online and during that bizarre Oval Office presser where he acted like the president, with his toddler seated at the desk beside him the whole time. (Musk also brought his child X.) Today, let’s look at each, then talk about why he’s lying so openly and brazenly about non-existent fraud. [...]

No, there aren’t millions of 150-year old fraudulent Social Security recipients

Musk made a startling claim during his Oval Office press conference last Wednesday. He told the nation that there were 150-year olds in the system who were still receiving Social Security payments. “It’s just common sense. It’s not draconian, or radical,” Musk began. “Just a cursory examination of Social Security,” he continued, sounding very much like a guy who thinks he knows everything but actually understands nothing, “you know, we’ve got people in there who are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone who’s 150? I don’t. They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.” Here’s the thing. The system was written decades ago using COBOL, a language that none of his teenage plus programmers likely know much about. Older, experienced programmers would know, however, that finding 150-year olds in the system isn’t evidence of fraud. In COBOL, dates are referenced to May 20, 1875, when the world set the international metric standard. If a recipient’s birthdate is missing or incomplete, the system defaults to that date, meaning 150 years ago. The reason there are so many “150-year olds” is because there are many people, especially older, rural citizens, whose exact birthday isn’t known.

No, there aren’t millions of dead centenarians receiving Social Security checks

Second, Musk claimed that millions of checks are paid out to people over 100. Here is his post on Twitter that had some 69 million views as of this writing: His conclusion looking at these numbers is that tens of millions of people over the age of 100 are receiving Social Security payments from the government, when most of them are dead. My goodness, that sounds terrible! How could this be happening?! The thing is, it isn’t. Yes, there are millions of people in the database well over the possible lifespan of a human. But no, they are not being paid anything. [...]

No, undocumented migrants are not receiving Social Security

As a topper to all this, Musk pushed a false and racist “great replacement” theory about migrants being lured to the U.S. with the promise of benefits like Social Security. He tweeted that the “real reason” Democrats are upset with fraud investigations is that “they are using your taxpayer money as handouts to attract and retain ILLEGAL immigrants. Their future voters. That’s what it’s all about. Truth.” Musk wouldn’t know the “Truth” if it bit him in the X. Undocumented migrants are not entitled to Social Security benefits or federal medical benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid. They have no real Social Security numbers because they were never issued them. Far more often than not, they pay into a system that they have no ability later to be paid out from. And to the extent they have fake Social Security numbers, they use these so they can get jobs, without any expectation that they will ever see that money again.

[...] Musk is lying to the American public in order to justify deep cuts to Social Security, all in the name of eliminating fraud. It’s a smokescreen for what he is really after. He also wants to claim credit for purging deceased recipients, even though the government already does this routinely, in order to justify his continued access to the systems he is rapidly taking over.

Elon Musk and his crack DOGE team have pushed the myth that there are millions of 150-year old fraudulent Social Security recipients and millions of dead people obtaining Social Security benefits. Also, Musk pushed the lie that undocumented immigrants come to our country for SS benefits (Undocumented migrants are not entitled to Social Security benefits or federal medical benefits such as Medicare and Medicaid).

See Also:

NewsNation: Is Elon Musk right about widespread Social Security fraud? Nope.

[thesaintelectric]

imagine you have like, an aga. old ass oven that is really good at its job of oven. and some tween rocks up and says 'hey this sucks its old and bad, we are going to replace this' and by 'replace' the mean ask an ai to recreate its exactly functionality with a short turn around time so they don't test it.

but they are complex beasts agas so it doesn't quite work and breaks completely. now you have no idea what it is or how to fix it, and neither do they! so you have to completely take it apart to fix it. then once you do that it breaks again. and repeat.

doge/elon wanting to rewrite millions of lines of COBOL (in java i have to laugh) is so funny i wish i could translate it to tumblrinas

[rattusrattus3]

Hey! Watching your new vid rn and got to the tech troubles part. As a programmer: Google is no longer a good search engine when you have issues with (modern) technology. It's still my go to for issues with older stuff, eg if I was trying to remember a keyword in COBOL I'd still google it, but more modern stuff I'd recommend DuckDuckGo instead.

The enshittification of google has made DuckDuckGo superior by the same method that our dear hellsite here has become the most habitable social media platform lol. The only reason google is still preferable for older stuff is that it's had so much more time (and resources) for indexing that while the search algorithm itself for DuckDuckGo is now superior, it's just a lot less likely to have a link to the one 2006 forum thread relevant to your issue in its database ykwim.

Anyway yea the reason you struggled to find the solution wasn't you, it's that the nature of tech is that every once in a while, you gotta switch to a new information source. Even Stackoverflow isn't what it used to be 😔

Thank u!!! I’ll keep that in mind for next time , I really am so NOT intuitive with tech, so it really makes me feel like a dummy when I can’t sort it out ; but hearing that it’s not just me makes me feel a lot better :-)

(I hate how enshitified the entire internet has gotten 🙃)

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” rife with fraud, waste, and abuse. President Donald Trump argued in his State of the Union address that there are millions of people over the age of 100 who are fraudulently on the Social Security rolls, with some receiving government benefits. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers are calling Social Security Administration workers inefficient and threatening to make major reductions in its workforce based on that argument.

The problem with these arguments is none of them are true and represent only the latest in high-level disinformation directed at federal programs. As Elaine Kamarck and I argue in our recent book “Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation,” disinformation has become rampant in many different areas and threatens public understanding of policy issues. False data claims undermine trust in government and weaken confidence in the effectiveness of public programs.

Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme; it is a government program into which people pay while they are working and later retrieve benefits after they reach retirement age. It is a public fund financed by payroll taxes paid both by businesses and employees that funds around 59.6 million people. While the Social Security Trust Fund faces financial shortfalls, increasing the taxable income cap beyond its current $168,600 limit could significantly extend the program’s solvency.

According to Social Security Administration data, about 89,000 people over the age of 100 receive benefits, and nearly all are legitimate recipients. The agency, along with the General Accounting Office, routinely audits beneficiaries to detect fraud and has found no evidence supporting Trump’s claim of millions of dead or fraudulent beneficiaries. Indeed, Wired Magazine reported on February 17 that computer programmers pointed out how the list of extremely old people on the Social Security rolls is the result of “…a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.”

DOGE investigators suggest Social Security staff are inefficient and wasteful, independent analyses showing the agency is among the most cost-effective in processing claims. For example, Professor Pamela Herd of the University of Michigan notes that the agency’s administrative costs have declined “from 2.2% in 1957 to just 0.5% today”, making it one of the federal government’s most efficient agencies.

These attacks are not isolated, as other agencies have also been targeted by false narratives. Shortly before its budget and personnel were massively slashed, Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development a “criminal organization” without evidence to support that claim. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was dismantled on the grounds that it harms corporations and no longer protects consumers, while the Department of Education faces substantial cutbacks with critics arguing it does little to advance public education.

The harsh and often inaccurate rhetoric surrounding federal agencies represents a way to delegitimize government and justify deep cuts in agency operations and staffing. If government enterprises are seen as criminal, unlawful, or engaging in fraudulent actions, it becomes easy to justify draconian measures that dismantle those agencies—highlighting the powerful consequences words have on shaping beliefs and actions related to government functions.

The disinformation risks for Social Security are particularly worrisome. As its former commissioner, Martin O’Malley has argued that inaccurate claims about waste and abuse could lead to wholesale employee layoffs and harm the efficiency of agency operations. That may happen soon. Without persuasive evidence, Musk has claimed in a Fox Business News interview that there is over $500 billion in wasteful spending at the Social Security Administration, and the entitlement program could be reduced without any harm to beneficiaries.

That is not likely to be the case because a shrunken agency with fewer workers will likely suffer problems in claims processing and beneficiary payouts. Without experts who understand its IT systems and payout processes, there could be interruptions in services or difficulties for people filing claims who no longer are able to go to local offices to check on their eligibility.

Right now, Social Security is one of America’s most popular government programs. Eighty percent of Americans in a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey held favorable views about Social Security. Around 40% of seniors rely on it as their sole source of income. For Americans who live in three-generational families, cuts or delays in Social Security payments to seniors could impact their children’s ability to support their grandchildren. Social Security is a government success story that serves both taxpayers and beneficiaries quite well. The spread of disinformation about Social Security threatens not only the program’s future but also the sustainability of numerous other government initiatives.

[aladaylessecondblog]

Red Mountain Waffle House late night brain blast

Sotha Sil is the last remaining COBOL programmer

He has many, many worshipers that aren't Dunmer

[erik-even-wordier]

So you have noticed DOGE has never produced any evidence to back up their claims

So you have noticed DOGE has never produced any evidence to back up their claims

Good. That is a start.

Now look at the qualifications of the people doing the ‘audits’, who range in age from the teens to the mid 20’s.

Not one of them has any experience or training in auditing. They are self described ‘hackers’ — people who illegally break into computer systems. One is known for selling the secrets of his previous employer to their competitors. Another is known for setting up propaganda sites for Russia.

However, their computer expertise — the only expertise they claim to have — has been showed to be lacking as well. Not only did they not know about the default date in COBOL (something I knew about for decades. Formal computer training rather than just what a hacker picks up in bits and pieces is useful) but they created a server to hold all the information they took from those agencies, including classified information they were not qualified to touch. That server has ALREADY been hacked multiple times by multiple people. Most of them were satisfied creating popups to tell the users how easy it was to break in. We do not know how many times it was hacked by foreign agents working for our bitterest enemies in order to get that classified information, or to get your financial information to sell to telemarketers. That proves their incompetence in the one area where they pretend to have expertise.

As a former security officer in an office in the Criminal Division of USDOJ which dealt with significant amounts of classified information, it is my professional opinion that their server should be impounded, examined to try and find out what was compromised, and immediate steps taken to minimize the damage. The people responsible for exposing that information should at an absolute minimum be pulled from their current positions until they have been properly trained in how to handle such material and get security clearances. We sometimes get problems like this when some novice exceeds his authority out of ignorance, and clearly these people are novices, but normally they have more experienced supervisors who try to keep them out of trouble. That does not appear to be the case here.

And that brings up the additional problem of a complete lack of experience and competence in the job they CLAIM they are doing — audits. Any audit should be run by a competent and experienced auditor. Where computer expertise is needed they can hire real experienced and competent computer experts, including system accountants who are highly skilled in both computers and accounting systems, who know what they are doing, under the direction of a professional and experienced auditor.

I once discovered that a major accounting system was consistently understating personnel costs. I gave them the programmers the appropriate information necessary to pinpoint the problem. It turned out some tapes from a legacy system were not converting properly, and the data was being lost. The underlying problem was fixed and we had accurate reports.

Did you notice how that differs from DOGE? A problem was found. It was thoroughly researched to find the underlying problem. The problem was fixed. Work went on as normal. That is the type of thing which would occur in an audit. No one said “shut down the whole agency and claim its entire yearly budget as a cost savings.” That is just PART of the difference between an audit and what DOGE does.

Here are other differences. In a real audit, everything is documented. There is a search for discrepancies. When they are found, first they are verified to see if they are actual errors. If they are, their actual impact is calculated and the underlying causes are researched. When they are discovered, recommendations are made based on the correcting the underlying and the impact of making those changes. Any ��savings’ would be based on comparing the costs of the original problem to the costs of correcting them. At that point there is a report which may or may not be made public, but which is shown to be accurate.

All DOGE does is find something it does not understand, immediately loudly make unsubstantiated claims, and start firing people and closing down organizations without going through any of those other steps, and immediately claim to have saved the full budget of the organization without considering in any way the costs of their own actions. And they do that with no clue what the organization actually does, or what impact THEIR actions will have.

After an audit, an organization should be operating better and more efficiently. It should not be shut down.

I am genuinely worried about the people being fired. Not just for their sakes, but because the impact this might have on our national security. When those people get fired, they do not just quietly disappear into the void. They get new jobs. That have to in order to continue to eat.

And guess who really wants to hire them? Let’s look at those people responsible for maintaining our nuclear arsenal. There is one country who would LOVE to get their hands on ANY of those highly trained people. Iran. They have been working on developing nuclear weapons ever since Trump unilaterally broke the treaty that stopped them during his first term. Having those people would be a major breakthrough for them, and they would become a nuclear power MUCH faster. I do not want that to happen. But DOGE deleted all the information about those individuals and cannot find them to rehire them. Iran only needs to get their hands on one of them, though they would prefer all.

Look at the other people they have fired. There are similar scenarios for many of those as well.

This entire operation has been a major disaster from the beginning, and the long-term consequences are truly catastrophic.

[alanshemper]

[31 Aug 2020]

During the 1960s, as computer programming increasingly came to be regarded as a science, more and more men flooded into what had previously been a field dominated by women. Many of these men fancied themselves to be a cut above the programmers who came before, and they often perceived COBOL as inferior and unattractive, in part because it did not require abstruse knowledge of underlying computer hardware or a computer science qualification. Arguments about which languages and programming techniques were “best” were part of the field’s growing pains as new practitioners tried to prove their worth and professionalize what had been seen until the 1960s as rote, unintellectual, feminized work. Consciously or not, the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise.

[...]

In a broader sense, hating COBOL was—and is—part of a struggle between consolidating and protecting computer programmers’ professional prestige on the one hand, and making programming less opaque and more accessible on the other. There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” In other words, if your code is easy to understand, maybe you and your skills aren’t all that unique or valuable. If management thinks the tools you use and the code you write could be easily learned by anyone, you are eminently replaceable.

The fear of this existential threat to computing expertise has become so ingrained in the field that many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers. As one contemporary programmer, who works mainly in C++ and Java at IBM, told me, “Every new programming language that comes out that makes things simpler in some way is usually made fun of by some contingent of existing programmers as making programming too easy—or they say it’s not a ‘real language.’” Because Java, for example, included automatic memory management, it was seen as a less robust language, and the people who programmed in it were sometimes considered inferior programmers. “It's been going on forever,” said this programmer, who has been working in the field for close to thirty years. “It's about gatekeeping, and keeping one’s prestige and importance in the face of technological advancements that make it easier to be replaced by new people with easier to use tools.” Gatekeeping is not only done by people and institutions; it’s written into programming languages themselves.

[canajunfinances]

Despite the rapid rise of FinTech, the backbone of modern banking remains COBOL, a programming language developed in 1959. This article explores how legacy financial systems continue to run on COBOL due to risk aversion, stability, and reliability. Financial institutions prioritize uptime (99.999%) and avoid system-wide replacements unless absolutely necessary. While FinTech boasts cutting-edge interfaces, critical financial transactions—like account creation and fund transfers—still rely on COBOL’s structured efficiency. The takeaway? New technology may evolve, but old, reliable systems refuse to fade away.

#COBOL, #FinTech, #bankingtechnology, #legacysystems, #financialstability, #riskaversion, #bankinginfrastructure #archive

[jkottke]

150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security. Musk’s “evidence” of “massive fraud” at the Social Security Administration is actually just the way COBOL programmers deal with dates.

[sab-cat]

Feb 17, 2025

Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies.

COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it.

Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the "Convention du Mètre."

These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150....

The database Musk took the screenshot from listed almost 400 million people, which is more than five times the number of people receiving benefits in 2024, according to the SSA’s own website. It’s also significantly more than the entire US population.

The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.

“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records,” Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency executive-turned-whistleblower, tells WIRED.