221–230 of 361 posts
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It's common practice in Vatican Bank.
How do you know? Have you seen one?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vatican_latin_atm.jp...
$100 an hour, so $208k a year (assuming no time off), for a guy with 30+ years working on a critical system in an industry where floor traders can make 7-8 figures, and huge bonuses are paid to "analysts". I have plumber buddies that make more than that per hour (and with a crew can make more a year). That's why a couple years ago when I had access to a zseries, and was hearing about how "desperate" the banks were I…
I'll also throw in the counterpoint that you get taxed heavily on these earnings and you (usually) don't get benefits.
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Our mainframe is expensive but it isn't slow. It's not exactly sitting on the same hardware from the 70's.
The amount of performance (particularly CPU) you get per dollar is very low. Mainframes are all about lots of I/O with ridiculously high reliability and availability, but for an absurd amount of money.
We're not running our modeling engines and that stuff on it. We have HPC for that.
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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...
I frequently say that IBM sells websphere to assure that they continue to sell mainframes. Because everyone knows if your going to replace your mainframe, you need to rewrite it in java, and what better framework than one provided by IBM! Then when the whole project ends up taking 100x the hardware IBM can pretend there is some secret sauce in those mainframes. But, to the linked answer. While the details differ a bi…
Of course Java is going to be slow when the "Enterprise Architect" and his minions will push for hundreds of classes that barely do one thing right and have several inheritance levels deep while the "mainframe" people are shuffling data using something that's simpler than a csv
Also, the virtualization magic is good enough so that the COBOL people keep playing with their 70's technology while ignoring modern-world problems
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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.
This isn't your average developer banging out Rails or Swift apps. This is extremely specialized knowledge of huge and arcane systems that are decades old. Entirely different ballpark in terms of knowledge and skillset.
And as long as you fit the "correct" demographics for living in the south.
> As of the 2010 census, the ethnic makeup and population of San Francisco included: 390,387 Whites (48.1%), 267,915 Asians (33.3%), 48,870 African Americans (6.1%), 4,024 Native Americans (0.5%), 3,359 Pacific Islanders (0.4%), 53,021 from other races (6.6%), and 37,659 from two or more races (4.7%). > Atlanta 2010 census: 211,365 Whites (38.4%), 28,071 Asians (5.1%), 286,126 African Americans (54.0%), ... So you me…
$100 an hour, so $208k a year (assuming no time off), for a guy with 30+ years working on a critical system in an industry where floor traders can make 7-8 figures, and huge bonuses are paid to "analysts". I have plumber buddies that make more than that per hour (and with a crew can make more a year). That's why a couple years ago when I had access to a zseries, and was hearing about how "desperate" the banks were I…
My own consulting rate is higher than that, and there's way more people with my skill set. One of the big differences is I work with companies that value code as an asset. It sounds like he's working with Banks which view code as a cost of doing business.
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I did the same to enable XML messages to flow over MQ between an RS/6000 based front office FX options system, and a back office S/390 system. IIRC there were six (!!) different EBCDIC codepages that could be in play. I had a code generator that would crank out C or Java bindings that could martial between the expat results and the COBOL data structure. 20 years ago now!
Not sure if you remember but sendmail used to require a certain amount of m4 knowledge and hackery. Emboldened by that and reading the dragon book I was very impressed with myself when I wrote a COBOL parser in a mix of C, lex and YACC that automatically generated the needed 'C' structs and Sybase database layout to load data fed from a System/36. I made the data supplier put his code in the first part of the magtape…
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…
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If you want to move off of COBOL + mainframe, that kind of necessitates a rewrite, doesn't it?
Emulate the mainframe and make a modern abstraction interface over the platform. We investigated this option for some IBM 360 COBOL code for a project I was running. We were a very small team and were market consumers (not implementers) of the original system which got open sourced in a panic. We eventually chose not too - but seriously considered it. If I were the owners (the Fed) I would have.
