Maybe the COBOL devs aren’t here.
HN is a place where everyone is, so it's reasonable to assume that some Cobol devs may also lurk here.
Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
11–20 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#12Cloud migrations
Rewriting things in Java? Or maybe running Cobol in the cloud directly? A mainframe has a number of properties of the cloud, in a sense.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#13Bank.
Can LLMs do Cobol?
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#14Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#15Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#16What I'm wondering: Are the salaries high? Not just because you've been employed at the job for a long time with regular raises, but because it's hard to find developers.
No the salaries aren't high. They are typically lower than other software engineer salaries. There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough.
The very high salaries you hear about sometimes are always for VERY specific mainframes that are extremely old with a lot of quirks, and are usually being paid to consultants.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#17Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#18I’m not a COBOL dev but I work with mainframes(z/OS).
Most COBOL applications I’ve seen have been banking and insurance related with few exceptions.
Most of them either run as a series of batch jobs or via transaction managers like IMS and CICS.
Backends are usually sequential files(we call them datasets),DB2,VSAM(Virtual Storage Access Method) or DL/1(hierarchical DB that’s part of IMS).
Quite a few places I’ve seen have run IBM MQ as well.
If changes are made to these systems it’s often due to changes in regulation or driven by changes in the business(new financial products being offered etc.
Off-topic: I’ve seen quite a few mainframe related posts on HN fly by over the years. I’ve been meaning to create an account and participate but I’ve only gotten around to it just now.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#19I have written cobol in the past. I worked at a financial company that had a decent amount of cobol devs around, with the primary database being DB2. The code is mostly financial transactions and record updates, basically CRUD code. Cobol was essentially the backend with the front end being Java and Javascript/Angular.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#20Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel a new system was built in-house (no longer trusting external consultants) and his job was explaining what the system does. Probably well paid but he didn't seem to care, he just wanted to work less and retire on good terms.