Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where would they hang around? Curious to learn about other programming/tech communities
They aren't really into tech outside of work.
... or, arguably, inside of work. :)
Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
61–70 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#62This is in my past, so no COBOL recently but in one of my first consulting gigs I wrote several business programs in RPG III. Which is the nightmare that you might imagine it is. Think plugboards. Halfway through the IBM guy came by and installed COBOL and wow what a difference. My last act was to recommend that they get a computer department. And so Tom Monaghan called IBM
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#63Not a COBOL developer, but working at a sizeable bank I witnessed the phasing out of their mainframes and AS400 systems. They ran some critical systems, both in retail and wholesale banking. They either converted to java, and optimized that code, but some COBOL code from the mainframe, and all of the AS400 stuff was converted into Micro Focus COBOL, which runs on Windows, which could be hosted on our Private Cloud. I…
Can you describe the cultural gap? I haven't really met these folks in the wild, so I'm curious what the programmers of yore were like.
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Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Heh I worked one of these. We handled arithmetic in the DB tho. Lot of PL/pgSQL running under the typescript, TS was more of like a middleware or API layer for things that could change more frequently. Finance code is to some extent transcribing of regulation & law into code and we kept all that in postgres.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
But the code still has to work. LLC's and other corporate structures only protect the owners if the company goes bankrupt, which it will if its systems stop working.
Ditto with market control, it's not some permanent crown you achieve. Companies have to keep performing to keep their market share.
E.g., if you opened an account at a major bank, and your transactions started failing, would you keep banking there?
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#66I’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 ?
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#67I knew a guy who wrote a lot of 360 assembler back in the day, never a COBOL programmer.
I was a consultant at a very large insurance company in the 90s when the dictate came from the top “no more assembler”. There were a few groans from the audience of developers.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#68What 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.
A while back I came across job listings for a COBOL consultancy near me that only seems to hire fresh grads for well below market rate (not much higher than retail/restaurant jobs - this is in a cheaper part of the US). They promised to train their employees from the ground up and implied that COBOL knowledge would set them up for a really profitable career. It seems like they were taking advantage of the common advice: "just become a COBOL developer, it pays well because nobody wants to use COBOL!" But I'm skeptical that someone coming out of that consultancy with 2 or 3 years of experience in nothing but COBOL would do well on the job market.
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#69I 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?
Re: Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?
#70My brother works with COBOL for a bank here in Brazil, he is young (in his 20s), started before finishing his degree. Pay is poor, hours are insane, he is overworked as hell, and anything “modern”, like git, is out of the question.
He’s trying to learn Go now and modernize himself to see if he can get out. I’m trying to help as much as I can. Hopefully, he’ll land a job somewhere else this year.