Shawn Nailor, deputy secretary of the Vermont Agency of Digital Services, is 53.
He is just two years older than the computer system that determines Vermont’s unemployment benefits.
In an interview with VTDigger, Nailor said the mainframe computer is not the problem with the unemployment compensation system anymore.
Until the beginning of the pandemic, an old mainframe on Green Mountain Drive in Montpelier hosted Vermont’s unemployment compensation system. No longer. The system is now hosted on a modern mainframe run by Blue Hill Data Services, a company based in southern New York.
Blue Hill hosts large financial institutions. A spokesperson for the company said it hosts the mainframes of a lot of states, counties and private companies.
“The thing that you can walk into a room and see is running on current technology,” Nailor said. “During the pandemic, we migrated to this environment.”
Nailor likened the mainframe to the foundation under a house. Having a modern mainframe, he said, is analogous to making sure the foundation under a house is solid.
“It doesn’t assure that anything above it is solid,” he said.
The next layer is the operating system. Vermont’s unemployment benefits system is based on a traditional IBM operating system. Nailor said Vermont is finishing up a project to upgrade that operating system to a more sustainable system.
He likens the operating system to the floor in a house.
“It prevents you from falling through,” Nailor said.
The third component is the code — the application — and that is where the problems remain.
“It’s the engine that runs the determination of benefits,” Nailor said. It’s also the engine that runs the determination of employer contributions.
“We’ve got the solid foundation,” Nailor said. “We’ve got the solid floor. But the actual dwelling — the roof leaks, the electrical is shot, the plumbing is shot. It’s hard to maintain.”
Remember COBOL?
The 51-year-old application uses F-COBOL, a code that was around before Combined Business-Oriented Language, or COBOL, the language created in 1959 by Grace Murray Hopper, was standardized.
COBOL is still widely used on the mainframes of large financial institutions, but it is hard to find developers for it. Programmers are retiring. Colleges and universities have not offered COBOL instruction for decades because academics have viewed it as a program for maintenance, not innovation.
“Something that predates it, we’re talking about a really limited workforce,” Nailor said.
The state employees who were responsible for programming the unemployment compensation system have been retired for years. Nailor said the state has had some success bringing in contractors, and is relying on those contractors to keep things running.
Vermont is not alone in running its unemployment system on a legacy program. The surge in unemployment claims due to the pandemic has spurred demand from New Jersey, Connecticut, Kansas, California, Rhode Island and Iowa for COBOL programmers.
Some members of Congress are trying to address the shortage of programmers for legacy computer languages such as COBOL. U.S. Rep. Ben Cartwright, D-Pa., has sponsored legislation that would offer $100 million to colleges and universities to create courses and offer scholarships to teach the languages.
IBM has opened a portal to connect COBOL programmers with customers, as well as a free open-source course in COBOL for beginners and professionals who want to refresh their skills.
“It has been so successful,” said Meredith Stowell, vice president at IBM Z Ecosystem. “We have a lot of learners that are taking advantage of that content.”
No mainframe hacking
In Texas, Bill Hinshaw, co-founder of Cobol Cowboys, a firm that connects clients with programmers, reports business is growing.
“The last 18 months, it really picked up,” Hinshaw said.
Besides state unemployment insurance systems, COBOL is still in wide use in business. Hinshaw said 90 percent of credit, debit and ATM card swipes still use COBOL.
“When PCs first came out, there was talk that COBOL was on the way out,” Hinshaw said. “The direction was to quit teaching COBOL.”
Now, he said, teaching COBOL in colleges is coming back.
Hinshaw called it the workhorse of large corporations.
“You don’t hear about mainframes being hacked,” he said. “They change firewalls about every 15 seconds.”
He can call on more than 500 COBOL independent consultants to service clients. The consultants’ median age is 59 to 60, but Hinson said he also has younger people offering services.
Back in Montpelier, even the contractors have trouble knowing how to change the program every time an adjustment needs to be made to unemployment compensation.
“Over those 50 years, there have been things done to the code to meet some sort of immediate need,” Nailor said. For example, each recession has added complexity to the system.
“And now it’s like trying to follow a thread backwards,” Nailor said.
One misplaced character
Unlike modern systems, which can be changed in real time, the unemployment compensation system has to be tested every time a change is made. Every edit has to be moved to a test environment, where the batch of data is run to see if it works correctly. Every information technology consultant must work with someone at the Vermont Department of Labor familiar with the unemployment compensation system.
One innocent misplaced character causes the system to abort.
“And we lose a day of production,” Nailor said. “This is not a real-time system. This is a batch system. It accumulates all the things people want it to do over the course of a day, and the next day the process starts over. We’ll encounter something and then we have to delay and lose the next day to figure out what caused the system to fail, and then go back the next night.”
The data are stored in files in an unstructured manner.
“The way the files are structured, it’s more like if you were to type into a Word document without spaces,” Nailor said.
He cited as a theoretical example a date of birth that comes after a person’s name.
“If someone needs to look up my date of birth, they have to know to look at my record’s 12th position,” Nailor said.
That’s because his name, written without a space as ShawnNailor, takes up 11 characters. But the next person’s name might take up only eight characters, and so their date of birth would begin at the ninth position.
“We’re finding people to manipulate it, but it’s such a challenge,” Nailor said.
The people rarely are local. They could be someone retired from Wall Street but working 20 hours a week.
“Our preference is people who have worked in finance,” Nailor said.
Nailor said the state continues to talk to people about replacing the system. The U.S. Department of Labor is starting to offer grants to remedy fraud. It has offered so-called “Tiger teams” of consultants to help states with their computer systems, and Nailor said Vermont is considering that option.
“All options are on the table,” Nailor said. “I want to see, for Vermonters’ sake, this thing modernized.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of Blue Hill Data Services.
