Gonna take a wild guess and say old mainframes and COBOL. When I trained at St. Lawrence, they were training us on that for the Ontario government, since they had a heavy reliance on that style of technology. It was way cheaper to continue to train fresh and ignorant new students to learn the old ways than to convert to anything new and decent.

Once installed in the Ontario government, there was kind of a divide between people who wanted to move on up to the Federal government (seemingly they were not concerned about skills not being transferrable, hence my guess on COBOL and old mainframes being in use), and the other half who wanted to just put in their time in one place and collect their paycheque and pension.

Also, can confirm on the expensive contractors. IBM in there pushing Rational Rose and hardcore waterfall did nobody any favours at all.