Net, but none of the traditional languages of the data center such as C or Cobol.

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This is a particularly pressing problem in insurance IT because policy administration systems for life insurance are often running on Cobol.

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Outdated mainframes, COBOL applications whose developers have long since retired, if not died, and code everyone is afraid to touch have long been well-known problems in IT for at least a decade.

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Financial institutions have long employed armies of developers to maintain their complex back office systems but until recently the majority of these developers worked in programming languages such as COBOL which have little applicability to startups.

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Instead of trying to revamp JIMS with brand-new technology, Harris County has stuck to its grand-design architecture by migrating its legacy database to the more current Model 204 Database Management System, made by Computer Corporation of America, and rewriting Cobol applications in the Model 204 language.

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While COBOL has not gone away at the banks, more and more of the technical staff spend their time programming new features and interfaces in modern languages and web application frameworks that provide highly applicable and transferable skills to startups only too happy to hire them for their technical training and domain experience.

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