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I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.
My mother used to teach Cobol back in the 80’s in Brazil but later she transitioned into management and haven’t touched a line of code for more than 30 years, she can’t even speak english wtf
Batch jobs, clunky and very verbose programs, nothing interesting. I... hated it.
What 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.
In my country, no, COBOL jobs aren't well paid. They are below average.
Bank.
Can LLMs do Cobol?
I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do is mostly very straightforward batch processing. It's ripe for automation with LLMs.
The flip side is that banks are usually very conservative about technology (for good reason).
I was part of team that was writing web applications that needed to call z/OS transactions. The IBM solution was to use their Transaction Gateway product, which cost a ton, and was slow as shit. We developed a framework that used annotations on the Java Side to map COBOL Records to Java Objects and invoke transactions over a TCP socket. Learning how to pack decimals and convert encodings was pretty cool. We ended up with a framework that was at least a zillion times faster than the IBM solution. Left that job though as the company was is distress and was losing customers (health plans). They eventually folded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can LLMs do Cobol?
> Can LLMs do Cobol? I imagine it's the one place where LLMs would absolutely shine. COBOL jobs are usually very verbose, lots of boilerplate, but what they do is mostly very straightforward batch processing. It's ripe for automation with LLMs. The flip side is that banks are usually very conservative about technology (for good reason).
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…
They really are. I had a parttime coworker who moonlighted some mainframe job and he often had another laptop on his desk connected to a z/OS terminal. He would show me some of the jobs and code occasionally too, really fascinating stuff, and he was quite good at it and could navigate quickly.