COBOL is an archaic BASIC'ish language that is sensitive to spacing. Get one line of your code with one space to many and let the error codes fly. It won't compile properly. You have to assign memory manual, designate it and format it. All up front in the declaration portion of your code. Making all the black boxes for your code isn't all that hard, it is the linking it all together that can be a monster. You will run into a whole lot of GOTO statements /cringe as a good portion of COBOL was created long before there were industry standards for code (ie: meaningful variable names) in place. Governments would sometimes contract out the programming and it was usually a rats nest to try and decipher as the more difficult your coding to change the more likely they would just hire you back to maintain it. Variable names that unless you had your spy decoder ring were just meaningless. This is all based off what I
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for COBOL. It was the first programming language I learned (I was in high school in 1976, on an IBM 360/30 mainframe that was obsolete even then). I also paid for college by programming in COBOL, never mind that the snobbish computer science faculty took every possible opportunity to disparage it.
It turns out to be very easy to apply the "structured programming" paradigm then in fashion to COBOL, and to write very readable and easily maintained code. It's was possible to write interactive applications with it, and even to write what amounted to a compiler in it, which I did as a way to extend COBOL itself for interactive use before the language added those features.
The reason COBOL got such a bad reputation is that so much awful, un-maintainable, unreadable spaghetti code was written in it. Programmers back in the 1960s often were recruited from other disciplines and didn't understand how to write good code. They also had slow machines with very limited memory to work with, making memory optimization a higher priority than maintainability.
It probably wouldn't be difficult for a recent CS grad (the most desirable programmer because they're young, cheap, and obedient) to learn COBOL. The likely problem any programmer would face in dealing a system like they have in NJ is that the code is poorly documented (if it's documented at all) and difficult to decipher. A recent grad would probably have more difficulty figuring out the function of all that spaghetti than a superannuated programmer who has specific experience with payroll or similar applications as well as with horrible spaghetti code.
The JCL, on which the system heavily depends, would be another challenge, as that was an opaque and esoteric "language" even when it was in common use. COBOL at least has some commonality with other programming languages, but JCL is in a class by itself and has no direct counterpart in any modern system.
Deciphering the code and JCL would surely be the biggest challenge any programmer would face, and it would take a lot of intensive effort under great pressure. Such heroic effort deserves appropriate compensation, no matter how much officials try to deny it. The failure to maintain and update the software was just another case of "penny wise, dollar foolish." Anyone who volunteers to undertake it would be insane.