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

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

#32

Post by zoom6628 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #4

Maybe the COBOL devs aren’t here.

Ex COBOL dev here. Started at NCR on COBOL for minis and mainframes. Then built stuff on Wang VS COBOL for ERP systems until 93. Quite a few other languages since then but been a Product Manager for past 20+ years.

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

#33

Post by machiaweliczny »

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.

There's surprisingly a lot of finance related jobs in TypeScript. I wonder what libraries they are using for money management.

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

#34

Post by devwastaken »

romanovcode wrote: post #29
ecshafer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough. Seeing the horrible performance from Indian offshore firms with modern languages I cannot imagine the mess they make with legacy languages like Cobol. Or is it the other way around?

Corps operate despite inefficiency not because of efficiency. LLC protection and market control are everything.

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

#35

Post by RSHEPP »

My mother and her husband are COBOL devs for a US state government. She works on the health insurance side for teachers and other state employees. Think claim processing.

Lots of batch jobs running at night. Their alert system is an actual human who calls my mom when jobs fail in the middle of the night.

It's high paying for the city they live in, but not high paying for software development. They will both have full retirement and healthcare for life, assuming the government can fulfill it. They are both fully remote since COVID too.

She's also worked for state lottery, teacher's retirement system and DOT.

edit: she says they have a SQL database, but mostly store in IBM IMS

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

#36

Post by jacktheturtle »

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…

nice, welcome to the party

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

#37

Post by slowmotiony »

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 was no remote desktop back then.

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

#38

Post by zeeframe »

jacktheturtle wrote: post #36
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…

nice, welcome to the party

Thank you!

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

#39

Post by jmclnx »

zoom6628 wrote: post #32
actionfromafar wrote: post #4

Maybe the COBOL devs aren’t here.

Ex COBOL dev here. Started at NCR on COBOL for minis and mainframes. Then built stuff on Wang VS COBOL for ERP systems until 93. Quite a few other languages since then but been a Product Manager for past 20+ years.

Same here, I worked on Wang VS COBOL too. IMO, it had the best TUI Screen generation Tools I have ever seen.

Towards the end, I worked on a project to port Wang VS OS and its COBOL to AIX. I was tasked finding issues with COBOL Programs we had on the VS. It was a good environment, but Wang went CPT 11 before it was ready :) It was rather close to being complete.

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