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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

I hope not. But lots of legacy systems that need maintenance and the occasional new feature?

I remember at the beginning of the pandemic state unemployment systems using COBOL and a lack of qualified developers was blamed as the bottleneck for processing claims. It was all over HN for weeks.

Were the salaries offered by these states also to blame? i.e are there enough qualified developers out there but unwilling to take jobs at the salaries offered by states? I suspect a bit of both - a lot of the old-heads in the space are retiring/dying, reducing the # of qualified developers, but I also suspect states want to cheap-out on hiring those that remain.

A lot of states have replaced their UI mainframe systems through outsourcing to companies such as FAST https://www.fastenterprises.com/. Last I checked, FAST had WA, MT, OR, and a couple of other states. This is in addition to their primary business of state tax systems replacement.

Changes typically require 7 figures, so they require a long lead time that coincides with the state's budget cycle.

Their UI customers, in case anyone is interested (CA, IL, MI, WA, MT).

https://www.fastenterprises.com/solutions/fastui/

Also, the cost of one of these replacement projects is about $80 million over 3 years plus 10-20 million a year maintenance. Averaged over 10 years, this about 2-5 times the cost of the old systems, depending on how you want to count.

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