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Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

reuters.com

11–20 of 361 posts

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#11

"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.

Yeah, $100 an hour for contract COBOL expertise sounds very low, but maybe I underestimate the number of COBOL people still around.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#13

From 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...

You can charge that much to hack on Wordpress in the US

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#14

From 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...

You can charge that much to hack on Wordpress in the US

This is simply untrue unless you're lying as a freelancer or working with a big enough wordpress installation that 'hacking on wordpress' would hardly be the correct description.

(read: most hosting companies effectively 'hack on wordpress' for you for free from most companies as a 'support option')

Also fyi, you can generally charge "that much"(as much as the US) elsewhere assuming you're proficient in english.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#15
post #9

Cobol 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…

A few concepts such as having redundant CPUs introduced a lot of technical challenges without clear pay outs. The previous inspiration was the comparably high cost of computing equipment. Redundancy techniques such as those inspired by the block chain, seem to be much hipper now days.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#17

From 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...

I'm curious what your experience in Australia has been for you to think that. In my experience that's not what I'd call a lot in Australia, most commonly your average basic IT contactor will charge $80-120/hr, let alone any sort of speciality.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#19

Cobol 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."

We have 50,000 lines of RPG code we need to replace over the next decade. Since the last RPG dev at our company is over 65 years old and can retire at any moment.

It's going to be funny when we replace it with Java and our business guys ask why it runs much slower.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#20

From 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...

Maybe for full-timers, but contractors in Australia will routinely rack up $900/day or more. Thoughtworks charges out their mid-level web developers for $1500/day. (All AUD)
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