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

reuters.com

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

#21

Post by Spooky23 »

randlet wrote: post #11
kingnothing wrote: post #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.

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

A lot of COBOL stuff is cut and paste crap, or just updating basic fields. There are people paying as little as $35/hr for these types of people, although most of the people at that rate are barely qualified to turn the computer on.

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

#22

Post by jwilliams »

ams6110 wrote: post #5

The 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…

Indeed - and although COBOL is the topic here, the issues are pretty similar with J2EE. There are a lot of legacy J2EE applications in banking and finance. Let alone the skills and inside knowledge you need to know the various containers and modern(ish) glue (WebSphere is the prime example).

Underlying this is that banks used to see IT/Technology as competitive advantage. A lot of tech came directly out of the banks. IT became a cost-center in the 90s and it was never the same.

The irony is that this tech stack was pretty good and fit-for-purpose for a lot of banking workloads. Plus it kept working... so that just lessened the investment required.

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

#23

Post by spullara »

hackerboos wrote: post #19
nodesocket wrote: post #2

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.

I just took a look at the language. I can imagine it could be faster than Java since it appears to be so low-level but I couldn't find any benchmarks. Really depends on how good the RPG compiler is when it comes to mapping the language to machine code.

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

#24

Post by clumsysmurf »

ams6110 wrote: post #5

The 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…

At my last employer, there were a few "mainframers" (we called them). I was curious so I would ask my mainframer coworker how things worked on his end.

I always struggled to understand, because it seemed everything was different ... the terminology, the culture, the ideas. I couldn't use analogy to tie what he was describing back to what I knew.

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

#25

Post by nickbauman »

I've worked in the financial sector as recently as 2006. Without getting too specific, some of the financial systems I worked on underpin large sectors of the economy, across many banking chains. While Java was starting to take over these systems, thankfully the banks and regulators were hedging their bets on JEE with the knowledge that someone would eventually have to take over these systems.

They were starting to think about growing an intergenerational community and started hosting applications in smaller chunks that individually comprised less risk (long before microservices was a coined term) and thinking in terms of APIS not implementations. They're not idiots.

Having said that it might be good to ask your local bank how much of their systems are implemented in COBOL.

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

#26

Post by parthdesai »

nickbauman wrote: post #25

I've worked in the financial sector as recently as 2006. Without getting too specific, some of the financial systems I worked on underpin large sectors of the economy, across many banking chains. While Java was starting to take over these systems, thankfully the banks and regulators were hedging their bets on JEE with the knowledge that someone would eventually have to take over these systems. They were starting to t…

Anecdotal, but my friend knew VP of Information Technology at one of the big 4 banks in Canada really well. The VP told my friend to learn COBOL and if he passed the interview, they give you a blank paper where you write down your salary.

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

#27

Post by dsr_ »

hackits wrote: post #18
dsr_ wrote: post #10

The problem is technical debt. Banks didn't realize they were software houses, they thought that IT was a tool.

Technically IT is a tool its their to service the business requirements.

That used to be true - up until sometime in the late 1970s/early 80s. Since then, banks are IT. Take that away and what's left?

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

#28

Post by rdiddly »

ams6110 wrote: post #5

The 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…

Yeah even though COBOL is called out by name here, the problem these guys are getting paid to solve seems like as much of a "domain knowledge" or "business rules" problem as a language one.

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

#30

Post by Trundle »

catmanjan wrote: post #6

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 used to charge $90/hour in Australia to set up wordpress brochure websites (and poorly at that).

Anyone who thinks that's a lot in the contracting world is undervaluing themselves terribly.

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