Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
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Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#2Cobol expert = $1,000 an hour rate. Great niche, but eventually will get replaced.
Awesome marketing and PR for his company Cobol Cowboys (http://cobolcowboys.com.
> His wife Eileen came up with the name in a reference to "Space Cowboys," a 2000 movie about a group of retired Air Force pilots called in for a trouble-shooting mission in space. The company's slogan? "Not our first rodeo."
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#3[deleted]
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#4It's easy to forget that most businesses America aren't publicly traded companies.
This guy found a profitable niche, realizes that it isn't sustainable long term, but makes perfect sense for him and his peers. Good for him.
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#5The problem really isn't COBOL. COBOL is not a difficult language. It reads almost like English sentences. Any competent programmer would not be challenged by COBOL. The problem is all the glue. JCL, SNA, CICS, ISM, ISPF, etc.
It's like the difference between Java (the language) and J2EE, except in the context of 1970s computer technology. It's not intuitive and not something you can really work through without a lot of training and experience.
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#6From the article "Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour"
In Australia that's a lot, but my understanding is that it's common for American developers to be on way more than this...
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#7> One COBOL programmer, now in his 60s, said his bank laid him off in mid-2012 as it turned to younger, less expensive employees trained in new languages.
[...] "The call back to the bank was something of a personal vindication for me," he said.
I find this being an oddly satisfying part of the story
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#8"Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old."
Any contract-based engineer would charge that, or more, regardless of the language. Fortune 500 companies are happy to pay $300 / hour to a consulting company for engineering time.
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#9Cobol expert = $1,000 an hour rate. Great niche, but eventually will get replaced. Awesome marketing and PR for his company Cobol Cowboys ( http://cobolcowboys.com . > His wife Eileen came up with the name in a reference to "Space Cowboys," a 2000 movie about a group of retired Air Force pilots called in for a trouble-shooting mission in space. The company's slogan? "Not our first rodeo."
They still teach COBOL and RPG at my old tech school. Went through the class and the tech behind the old mainframes are actually pretty neat. multi CPU processing, dynamically choosing which resources to use, easily transferring work to other machines and how everything works together so tightly. Just a lot of concepts that are getting 'rediscovered' instead of just looking at systems older than me (properly the same feelings that the people who learn lisp go through). They also put us through the normal java/visual basic hazing as well.
Though I ended up in electrical engineering.
Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset
#10The problem is technical debt. Banks didn't realize they were software houses, they thought that IT was a tool.