Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by avar » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 8:31 AM UTC

defined wrote: post #81

jfoutz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 EBC…

This is how you can implement isUpper() on EBCDIC: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/v5.24.0/handy.h#L1153

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

#132

Post by circadian » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 8:37 AM UTC

I used to work for a large multinational group whose core financial systems were written in COBOL during the seventies. I was told need to think of making the core systems future proof was identified as the company grew through the eighties and nineties, but never addressed. As time went by this attitude turned from one of "let's try and get on top of this" to "it can't be done because it's too risky / complex / old"...

The net result of this is that this ignorance spilled into the attitude towards technology across the group. I found it very demoralising as you always had to fight to convince non-technical staff why they needed to address technical debt that was 10/20/30 years old. In the end I managed to undertake some big and interesting projects successfully in spite of the "you'll never achieve that without a disaster" attitude, but the core COBOL system were just ignored as if somehow it'd go away (the reality was much more political and complicated than that, as it is with all multinationals...)

In the end I left for a position where people wanted me to build or rebuild things, rather than just spring the leaks around the problems. My point here is that unless you wield obvious experience or weight in this arena (as the "COBOL-legends" undoubtedly do) you'll have a job convincing people that it needs doing, at least until it goes up in flames.

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

#133

Post by sjtgraham » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 8:40 AM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #114

acchow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can "high 6 figures" mean high 100-200k? Ugh, I hate english.

It can't. This is not reasonable English, it's (presumably) a misspeak by the OP. People make these kinds of mistakes in every language. 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.

It's not unlikely at all for a highly specialized skill set. Speaking from experience.

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

#134

Post by twic » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 8:56 AM UTC

jmknoll wrote: post #125

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…

As a developer who recently turned thirty, I think about this a lot. I like working in startups, but its not going to fly forever. I'm already the old guy in the room. Would learning 'ancient' technology be a good career move? These systems aren't going anywhere, right? But the people who know how to maintain them are. Which means that maintaining these system, which already pays well, will pay even better in the fut…

Just hang around - the technologies you learnt when you were 20 will be ancient soon enough.

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

#135

Post by test1235 » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 8:58 AM UTC

acchow wrote: post #123

djaychela wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree, I heard a similar thing on the weather (here in the UK, in degrees Celcius), when the weather woman said we would be in "mid double figures" tomorrow, clearly meaning around 15 degrees, not 50!

They don't use "mid-teens" in the UK?

Yeah, we do. "Mid double figures" might make sense in the context of use, but my first evaluation of that phrase isn't a value less than 20.

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

#136

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 9:11 AM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #48

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."

If I made $1000/hour, I would only need to do that for like 3 or 4 years before I could retire.

What would be the fun in that?

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

#137

Post by skissane » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 9:12 AM UTC

defined wrote: post #78

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...

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…

> In this particular case, a file was preallocated in JCL to use N extents starting on a specific cylinder. Fixed size.

Sounds like a z/VSE system (formerly known as VSE/ESA, VSE/SP, DOS/VSE, DOS/VS, DOS/360). In DOS JCL (which is a different syntax to z/OS / OS/390 / MVS / OS/VS2 / OS/360 JCL), you manually allocate files to disk locations using the EXTENT statement. By contrast, in z/OS the operating system decides where on disk to locate your file (or dataset, to use mainframe terminology). (You don't have to manually allocate files any more in z/VSE – you can use VSAM, or store your files in libraries, and in both cases the OS decides on disk locations for you – but, originally, neither VSAM nor libraries existed, so you had to manually assign locations to all the files on disk.) It is very primitive, but remember it was designed in the 1960s to run on machines with only 16KB of memory–plus, humans could design a disk layout to maximise performance, by placing frequently used files on faster areas of the disk. Nowadays, the OS can do a better job of locating files on disks than humans can do, but this capability is kept for backward compatibility.

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

#138

Post by point78 » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 9:15 AM UTC

ternaryoperator wrote: post #108

acchow wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think since he wrote 'pays extremely well' it could mean 800k+

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

#139

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 9:18 AM UTC

nsxwolf wrote: post #31

clumsysmurf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

It's not weird if you think of computers that handle data byte by byte

Think of building a DB on an C64 and that will probably be more like it

But of course if you still have to worry how your data will be serialized to disk in 2017 that's your problem right there

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

#140

Post by skissane » Tue, Apr 11, 2017, 9:31 AM UTC

defined wrote: post #83

pmiller2 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open source Hercules is still alive. Attempts to commercialise it (TurboHercules) ran into legal trouble with IBM, but to my knowledge the open source Hercules project hasn't faced any issues. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I don't work for IBM, etc.)

IBM's licensing agreements don't allow you to run current versions of its mainframe OSes under Hercules. IBM will sell you an equivalent technology which you can legally run their OSes under, an x86 mainframe emulator called zPDT, but it is quite expensive (I have heard figures quoted like USD 5000). This is where TurboHercules ran into problems–they wanted to run current IBM OS versions under Hercules, but IBM says that violates their license agreements. TurboHercules tried to get the EU to force IBM into licensing their OSes to run on Hercules, but they didn't succeed.

By contrast, you are legally allowed to run old versions, 1970s vintage–in those days, IBM chose to release its operating systems into the public domain. That has little practical use, so can't be commercialised, but lots of people do that as a hobby, and there is stuff happening in that scene. I recommend this distribution of MVS 3.8J if you want some basic exposure to MVS – http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/ – a lot of the basics, like JCL and TSO, aren't hugely different, although a lot of features you'd expect on a modern z/OS system (e.g. ISPF, Unix, Java, TCP/IP, peer-to-peer SNA) are missing in this circa 1981 system.

It is also perfectly legal to run Linux under Hercules. I never have because it seems somewhat pointless–the differences between z/Linux and x64 Linux are minor–but I can see practical uses – you can port a project/product to z/Linux so your customers can run it on their IBM mainframes without you needing an IBM mainframe yourself.