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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?

#81

Post by ch_123 »

FredPret wrote: post #65
devwastaken wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> E.g., if you opened an account at a major bank, and your transactions started failing, would you keep banking there?

A lot of people who land in that situation do continue banking there since they are either tied into that bank through loans/debt, or lack the time/energy to move elsewhere.

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

#82

Post by schlauerfox »

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 ?

I'm not a mainframe programmer, but coming from x86 land I was very curious. I really learned a lot from the IBM Coursera "Intro to Mainframe" since none of my experience really applied it was tough. It had a real shell account to practice with though.

https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/ibm-z-mai...

Also the MOSHIX mainframe YouTube channel has a lot of info, and helped me setup HERCULES emulator for my own little mainframe experience.

http://www.hercules-390.org/

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

#83

Post by justin66 »

FL410 wrote: post #76
datpuz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, it's usually lack of awareness about modern security risks, and lack of familiarity with modern infrastructure paradigms. The latter really isn't a problem since these systems are usually standalone, but the former does become a problem - they often are from a time where this just wasn't something to consider. As a result, these legacy systems are often using default passwords, have tons of crazy st…

In my experience mainframes at financial institutions are hidden behind IBM middleboxes that are specifically designed to obviate the infrastructure risks. It's a classic example of a company selling you both the problem and solution.

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

#84

Post by ecshafer »

SL61 wrote: post #68
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.

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 advi…

The places I know that use (or used cobol 5 years ago) were all in hiring freezes for cobol developers and were trying to get off of it as much as they could (no new development, only maintenance, etc). I don't think its a surefire bet.

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

#85

Post by ninja3925 »

agnishom wrote: post #72
RSHEPP wrote: post #35

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…

By state, you mean US state, right?

Very likely.

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

#87

Post by mindcrime »

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 ?

There's an emulator called Hercules[1] that lets you run (some) mainframe stuff on a PC. There are limits to what you can run on it though, mostly due to licensing issues with IBM.

You can also look at the IBM Redbooks site[2]. Search for terms like Z/OS, MVS, CICS, DB/2, etc. and you'll find a lot of IBM books, whitepapers (well, they call them redpapers, but whatever) and so on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)

[2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

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

#88

Post by RSHEPP »

agnishom wrote: post #72
RSHEPP wrote: post #35

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…

By state, you mean US state, right?

Correct. Updated.

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

#89

Post by haiku2077 »

kazinator wrote: post #60
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…

PuTTY into Linux and you're in 16 colors.

My Linux terminal is 256 colors. Two hundred fifty six! That's like, every color!

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

#90

Post by ksherlock »

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…

Damn mainframe people flaunting their 16 colors like they're a peacock or something. Shit. We only had one color (and one absence of a color) and that was good enough.
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