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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

#81

Post by defined »

jfoutz wrote: post #69
nsxwolf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got that right. I had to deal with an interesting banking file format and I asked a question on Stack Overflow and got this gem of an answer. I politely accepted it as the right answer but boy oh boy does it feel like it's from an alien civilization. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28640159/what-is-the-diff...

Unix has a few tricks up its sleeve from when it wasn't the top dog. I hesitate to ever recommend perl, but pack [1] and unpack are pretty sweet for this kind of stuff. I only learned about them when a state sent me files in EBCDIC [2]. As with all things perl, you can convert from that to ASCII as a one liner. Or, rather, i helped someone much smarter than me do that, 20 years ago. [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/functi…

Please don't remind me. I had to convert the expat XML parser to compile on z/OS and work in EBCDIC, and found that round tripping between ASCII and EBCDIC was sometimes impossible because of the existence of not two, but THREE line terminator characters: CR, LF, and NL (0x85).

Not to mention that you cannot test for uppercase or lowercase like the ASCII `ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z'` because they are not contiguous in EBCDIC. A good reason to use the C RTL.

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

#82

Post by rodgerd »

dsr_ wrote: post #10

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

Banks have always been in the data management business. The first local bank in NZ was set up on the goldfields during the gold rush, and turned gold into data (managed on ledger books). If you got enough gold, you could move to the then-affluent city of Dunedin, and turn the data on your ledger into a house.

The tools have changed, but it's the same core expertise: data management.

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

#83

Post by defined »

pmiller2 wrote: post #46
Spooky23 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be perfectly fair, turning on a mainframe or minicomputer is a nontrivial operation.

This. Anyone who had doubts can get a stack of z/OS DVDs and the Hercules S/390 emulator and just try to get it to boot! Not trivial.

Although I don't know if Hercules is still alive and hasn't been shut down by the suits.

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

#84

Post by defined »

teh_klev wrote: post #43
coleca wrote: post #16

That's why I'm keeping my COBOL for Dummies and MVS/JCL handbooks as my retirement plan should the markets go south on my 401k. :-)

/digs out old Data General Interactive Cobol manuals :)

DG? You're really giving away your age ;)

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

#85

Post by zbruhnke »

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."

This probably should not matter to me but going to that website (even though its a super basic marketing page) and seeing it without SSL it just starts to bother me that someone who does so much bank consulting would care so little about a simple SSL cert on their own site, especially given how easy Lets Encrypt has made it.

Like I said this probably should not make a difference to me because I won't be hiring any "COBOL Cowboys" anytime soon but as a customer of many large banks who these people have probably worked for its a bit irksome for some reason

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

#86

Post by Joeri »

sanguy wrote: post #52

Been working on accounting systems in RPG and COBOL since ~1992. I also know C/X86ASM/Pascal/Delphi/VB/Fortran. Never bothered with C++ that much; played with Java a bit but Oracle irritates my bowels so moved away from that. As mentioned in the article it's good work; but it is also not easy work. You tend to go through cycles of being pushed out to brought back under extreme emergency at any costs to get stuff work…

> Companies never think of the old guys as the ones to implement the new system - that's a job for the "enterprise experts"

Exactly this is why rewrites fail. The challenge of a rewrite is not in mapping the core architecture and core use case, it's mapping all the edge cases and covering all the end user needs. You need people intimately familiar with the old system to make sure the new system does all the weird stuff which nobody understood but had good reasons that was in the corners of the old system's code. IMHO the best way to approach a rewrite is to make a blended team of experts of the old system and experts of the new technology, and you put a manager in charge with excellent people skills who can get them to work together.

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

#87

Post by StillBored »

pmiller2 wrote: post #46
Spooky23 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be perfectly fair, turning on a mainframe or minicomputer is a nontrivial operation.

Ha, IPLing, seems to hardly be the problem. Its turning it back off... But then again, if you give up and use the big red switch its not so bad, but god help the next guy who wants to turn it back on..

What really truly shocked me the most was "installing" a zvm/zos stack without relying on a machine image. Gosh, i'm still shocked thinking about it years later. I remember "writing" (cause copy pasting assembly with the assistance of someone who knew what the hell they were doing doesn't really qualify) system hooks for things that literally work out of the box in any OS written in the past 3 or so decades. Stunning..

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

#88

Post by dragonwriter »

tigershark wrote: post #44
hackerboos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 never wrote RPG code, but 50k LOC seems a pretty small project to me...

A 50k LOC program serving a critical business function without a test suite or requirements documentation can be quite a chore to replace, especially if you let it go until you have neither staff experienced in the language or with experience with the background of the specific application.

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

#89

Post by Bombthecat »

Joeri wrote: post #86
sanguy wrote: post #52

Been working on accounting systems in RPG and COBOL since ~1992. I also know C/X86ASM/Pascal/Delphi/VB/Fortran. Never bothered with C++ that much; played with Java a bit but Oracle irritates my bowels so moved away from that. As mentioned in the article it's good work; but it is also not easy work. You tend to go through cycles of being pushed out to brought back under extreme emergency at any costs to get stuff work…

> Companies never think of the old guys as the ones to implement the new system - that's a job for the "enterprise experts" Exactly this is why rewrites fail. The challenge of a rewrite is not in mapping the core architecture and core use case, it's mapping all the edge cases and covering all the end user needs. You need people intimately familiar with the old system to make sure the new system does all the weird stu…

What a ton of people forget : you also need to implement bugs or edge cases the same as in the old software.

More often than not the next developer using the old system worked around it. But never documented it as a bug (or wrong format, it featur! Not a bug!)

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

#90

Post by nodesocket »

zbruhnke wrote: post #85
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."

This probably should not matter to me but going to that website (even though its a super basic marketing page) and seeing it without SSL it just starts to bother me that someone who does so much bank consulting would care so little about a simple SSL cert on their own site, especially given how easy Lets Encrypt has made it. Like I said this probably should not make a difference to me because I won't be hiring any "C…

Besides the contact form perhaps, what really needs to be SSL? Specific reasons. FYI, the site is powered by Wordpress.
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