Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#181

Post by cafard » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

WBrentWilliams wrote: post #120

For my sins, I work in Education supporting PeopleSoft. That means that I do work in COBOL on occasion. I am not tasked with writing anything new in COBOL, but I so quite a bit of analysis and support. That is: I _read_ COBOL more than I write it. There are three flavors of COBOL that I deal with: PeopleSoft delivered, Vendor delivered, and University modified. Most of the work I do in COBOL breaks down to reading th…

Going on thirty years ago, I had some experience with Peoplesoft. I'm interested to hear that it still uses COBOL, though on the other hand, why shouldn't it?

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#182

Post by cedws » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 8:29 AM UTC

zeeframe wrote: post #18

I’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…

Do you think there’s any money in helping businesses modernise their stack as a consultant?

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#183

Post by activedinosaur » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

Actively working on multiple COBOL systems in the Healthcare field, under the umbrella of “Patient Accounting”. Still developing new programs and making modifications. I’d say these applications will be active for at least another 5 years!

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#184

Post by ranger77 » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

All I do is COBOL. Everyday. Our team has led over 40 “modernization” efforts, with about half migrating the apps to an X86 platform. There are “tons” of COBOL apps in Production, and not just limited to Financial organizations. I work with County, State and Federal systems. Retail, Insurance, Telecom, and Manufacturing. It’s not uncommon to work on programs that were original written in the 80’s or 90’s

The IBM Z is feature rich, but expensive and limited by software choices for apps not running ZLinux. (Think virtual Linux server)

The biggest catalyst now is the increasing license cost of mainframe third party software

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#185

Post by theodpHN » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

WBrentWilliams wrote: post #120

For my sins, I work in Education supporting PeopleSoft. That means that I do work in COBOL on occasion. I am not tasked with writing anything new in COBOL, but I so quite a bit of analysis and support. That is: I _read_ COBOL more than I write it. There are three flavors of COBOL that I deal with: PeopleSoft delivered, Vendor delivered, and University modified. Most of the work I do in COBOL breaks down to reading th…

Worked at a large insurance company in the late 90s where leadership touted a big benefit of converting to PeopleSoft Financials as part of their Y2K remediation was the elimination of their dependency on the archaic COBOL language, blissfully unaware that their new PeopleSoft applications were using Micro Focus COBOL under the covers. Oops! https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/post/take-note-significa...

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#186

Post by slowmotiony » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 8:58 AM UTC

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #69

slowmotiony wrote: post #37

I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there wa…

This hasn't been virtualized?

From what I understand, they log in to a citrix-like webpage called IBM Host On Demand and then start a java applet which is essentially a 16-color 3270 emulator that's connected to z/OS mainframe.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#187

Post by joshuapowell » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 12:49 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #66

zeeframe wrote: post #18

I’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…

Dumb question: mainframes and z/OS look interesting, how does one get started with learning about those systems and those environments ?

Great question. I work in the mainframe division of a Fortune 100 company.

The suggestions above are great if you're interested in learning about the technologies used on z/OS.

A vote for zeeframe's recommendation of the IBM Z Xplore course. Great stuff.

If you're looking for more reading material, I'd suggest the O'Reilly book "Modern Mainframe Development" book that covers a range of topics. (https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/modern-mainframe-d...)

If you're looking for an on-the-job training approach that would enable a career change into the mainframe, Broadcom offers something called the Vitality program (https://mainframe.broadcom.com/beyondcode/vitality_program) that runs every year in North America, Europe, and Australia. It's a program that would equip you with serious credentials that could help you land one of those System Programmer jobs or similar.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#188

Post by Cuesta03 » Mon, Jul 21, 2025, 3:41 PM UTC

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Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#189

Post by degamad » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:07 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #21

degamad wrote: post #7

I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services. Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.

Anything in particular you're replacing them with generally? I heard a story about replacing COBOL with JavaScript ... and my skin still crawls thinking about it.

A few different options, depending on the client. One went to a competing "commercial off-the-shelf" product. Another hired a company to build a system in a low-code application platform running on .NET.

Yet another went to a different mainframe system that they already had. They had multiple systems (both mainframe and Unix) which did similar jobs due to acquisitions over the years, and they moved the still-active customers from the most expensive mainframe to one of the cheaper mainframes.

Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

#190

Post by birdinleconey » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 11:33 AM UTC

Still maintaining COBOL here—mostly banking transaction systems (batch processing for ACH transfers) and state unemployment systems . Surprisingly robust, but we’re slowly wrapping them with APIs for modernization.

I built SeaDance (https://seedance.one/) partly to escape COBOL’s gravity. Legacy code may be eternal, but at least my side project uses this century’s tech stack.