Comment by Waterluvian
5 years ago
Generally speaking how long would it take to mobilize any competent senior software developer as a COBOL developer?
And could you imagine the DPA being invoked to govern what kind of _software_ output a company produces?
I know I'm being far fetched but I'm thinking about the hypothetical of the government just saying, "Apple, you're doing government payment software now. Here's your contact. Get to work."
I learned COBOL from the (then) standard text by McCracken back in the early 1980s. It’s not hard, a week or two for someone with programming experience.
The bigger problem is domain expertise (or lack of), and coming up to speed on the standards and idioms used in projects like this. Requirements and documentation likely out of date.