261–270 of 361 posts
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Lol, I heard it differently, 'In South they are supposed to hate us in theory but not in practice, in north they are suppose to love us in theory but not in practice.'
I'm still waiting for the white people from the north to throw a fit because I said this. It's not always well received...
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.
E.g. I'm working on a system that I could hypothetically abstract (I've got access to it, can poke with enough tests and test data, etc).
However. What I don't have is access to code or test injection into any of my sources / consumers. Both of which are expecting all the corner case quirks to be exactly identical and may actually have accreted software that depends on a specific quirk. A specific quirk that I have no way of knowing about. Or may send me something I've never seen and am not expecting because it's a 1:1,000,000 corner case, and we don't have any logging of an example that came through production.
I haven't worked on too much of the heavyweight stuff like you have, but I tend to take the perspective that "a 100% compatible rewrite is impossible." 95%+ maybe, but we're going to have to deal with the Did you ever pursue writing and dropping a new tailored load balancer / router type application on the incoming data stream such that you could divert a specific portion onto new system(s)?
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"Everyone in a red state is racist while I live in a post-racial utopia." Or something like that, I'd imagine.
In the South, whites don't mind if blacks are around, as long as they're not uppity. In the North, whites don't mind if blacks are uppity, as long as they're not around. Segregation is worse in the north than in the south.
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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.
So $100 isn't a lot? I thought since that was the point they were trying to make that this example was an employee rather than a contractor...
Edit: if the recipient of $100/hr in TFA is a full time employee, that is indeed a comfortable amount of money to be taking home.
Edit 2: After reading the relevant section, anyone doing this work would be foolish to charge less than $200-300/hr. Given the cost of a rewrite, if you could keep the old systems running for $1M/year, you would be saving the banks buckets of money.
When you provision a credit or debit card to an iPhone, it hits thousands of lines of COBOL for my bank. I wrote the application that delegates requests that come in on the payment network from Apple. Our issue isn't finding developers to maintain it, but if the application sits stagnant for decades, then the problem exists that we don't have product expertise to do the work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol, I heard it differently, 'In South they are supposed to hate us in theory but not in practice, in north they are suppose to love us in theory but not in practice.'
I'm still waiting for the white people from the north to throw a fit because I said this. It's not always well received...
If COBOL is such a big deal, a bank would get a steal of a deal if they funded some university chairs for professors who are willing to teach COBOL. "High Stakes Financial Software Engineering 332".
Others are indicating that the banks would rather hire a novice and let them learn the system. Seems like they have some sort of long term onramp procedures. Or their current crop of almost retirees are harboring a deep-seated desire to see the world financial system go down in flames. Which would be odd for someone who will presumably be depending on a financial instrument like a pension or 401k for income.
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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.