111–120 of 361 posts
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> high 6 figures a year without working too hard Wow, like $800-900k?
I expect he meant the high range of 100K-200K. It's a colloquialism I hear periodically. I took it to mean $180K-$200K.
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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.
What you do is function by function, convert the language by duplicating what it does in the new language. Resist any and all urges to fix it, refactor it, improve it, etc. Just translate.
Sounds low? That's what I'm charging as a web dev consultant.
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I expect he meant the high range of 100K-200K. It's a colloquialism I hear periodically. I took it to mean $180K-$200K.
How can "high 6 figures" mean high 100-200k? Ugh, I hate english.
It is highly unlikely that that the OP is making $800k/yr consulting as a programmer. That's $400/hr sustained for more than a year of fulltime work.
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…
I smiled at your last comment. You're clearly a charming individual :-) Out of interest, what's the solution here? With your experiences in mind, what are the banks doing wrong from a technological perspective? I get the impression banks should almost start again on the side, building a completely new bank they then (manually?) move customers over to, or just use to take in new customers whilst waiting for the previo…
Same happens with other French banks. As a personal PoV, banks' manned agencies provide bad service (from 20x delays to plain mistakes), so I won't cry for them.
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It is amazing how many companies don't think they're software companies, even though they are 100% reliant on their in house software. "We aren't a software company" is even a direct excuse I've heard a few times to justify ignoring technical debt.
What's worse is companies who 100% outsource to customized versions of a vendor's code. At least banks own the source to what they run even if they can't run it without a license. Clothing company I know sitting next to amazon pays the equivalent of about 5 fte senior amazon engineers a year in licensing the software they run every year to a vendor who charges them another 5 engineers worth to implement all of the cu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I expect he meant the high range of 100K-200K. It's a colloquialism I hear periodically. I took it to mean $180K-$200K.
How can "high 6 figures" mean high 100-200k? Ugh, I hate english.
We have quite a few old gentlemen that work about four hours a day on insane hourly rates doing this sort of work.
They seem to be living the life quite frankly, spending the rest of their day boating and what not. It's like the perfect retirement for them in that they get to stay challenged, get paid handsomely and still have most of the day to actually kick back.
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> high 6 figures a year without working too hard Wow, like $800-900k?
It's not unheard of. But you must understand that these are people that have a pretty decent job security in an often huge codebase that has been aquiring cruft for 30 years in language most people don't understand. I would like to be able to claim that the code is good, but some of the people writing it in the first place were not programmers. It is not strictly bad, but some parts are just mine fields. A bit relate…
Which would imply that there's a demand for people who know both COBOL, and whatever's the popular migration target for such systems these days (I assume Java?).
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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...
Although I was never a mainframe programmer per se, I did quite a bit of interfacing between mini/microcomputers and IBM mainframes, so I got to see under the hood a little. (If I write something stupid, it's either memory issues or ignorance). I recall seeing how files were allocated on disk (remember that mainframes have many different OSes, like OS\390, and even OSes on top of OSes like VM/CMS, and I don't remembe…