I don’t really understand this article. When the New Jersey government came out asking for Cobol programmers, all I remember was them talking about the strain on their system due to a demand spike. But this article spends its whole time talking about the UI? Unless I’m missing some context, this reads more like an ad.
It absolutely reads like an ad and an a pedantic ad to boot.
The system wasn't built to handle modern workloads, that might be part of why people decry it being ancient.
Despite starting out talking about architecture, which would be a difficult problem to tackle when having to interface with systems built around abstractions and conventions of a couple different eras back, more than half the article veers into the relatively easier task of user-centric UI design that his company can bill for.
I mean, that'd be great too, but the article is bait and switch.
Unemployment enrollment is a list of 30-130 questions + documentation, varying by state.
If you worked the same job for 5 years and got laid off, it’s closer to 30 questions. If you were laid off from a job after three months, worked at the post office in the last 3 years, got discharged from the national Guard with a service disability, it’s closer to 130 questions.
UI/UX is important because the business rules get complex and you can’t throw a random call center person at it — they need to know wtf they are talking about. You never have enough of those people. Making it a fully online transaction means someone needs to fully understand the business rules — which is harder than it sounds because new things get added often, and the old mainframes generally don’t get reengineered.
Also, when you say demand spike, in 2020, that means when all is said and done more UI applications than have been seen in the last 10 years, in a 60 day period.
This is the same info as I was aware of. The problem was crashing servers. But my complaint is that this article instead spends a lot of time complaining about the input forms
