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I can't tell if this is in the article as it's paywalled, but a company in York recently put up an advert for £20k/year for Cobol programmers with no programming experience required, doubling at the end of the training period.
Is that a livable wage there?
I’m curious why there aren’t more x -> x conversion/adapter tools available. Most languages have the same core data models/abstract concepts, if there really is an enterprise/business demand for a product, usually some company would come up with a solution. Personally I’m curious about COBOL and learning from it’s design, but I’m intrigued by this question in general.
Check the COBOL job postings, and you'll see desired skills in TSO, JCL, CICS, Natural/Adabase, VSAM, etc. Or equivalents of those for OS/400, MPE, or VMS mid-range platforms.
> The problem is that Cobol isn’t popular with new programmers. Enough with the COBOL shortage myth. Don't be fooled, not being popular is not the problem. The problem is COBOL jobs aren't competitive, they often even pay worse than other tech jobs. That's why they are either being outsourced or offered to 60 year olds in their spare time. (So arguably they're not that mission-critical, either.) But then who is writi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that a livable wage there?
£400 a week, in York? Hell yes. £800 once you’re done training for someone who couldn’t program before they started is not just good, it’s fantastic for anywhere in the U.K. outside London for a junior.
(Being paid to learn a skill from scratch does sound pretty objectively good, though.)
I can't tell if this is in the article as it's paywalled, but a company in York recently put up an advert for £20k/year for Cobol programmers with no programming experience required, doubling at the end of the training period.
I really dislike slotting things down to a language. If you are proficient in the underlying programming concepts, the language simply does not matter with the right amount of motivation.
I’m curious why there aren’t more x -> x conversion/adapter tools available. Most languages have the same core data models/abstract concepts, if there really is an enterprise/business demand for a product, usually some company would come up with a solution. Personally I’m curious about COBOL and learning from it’s design, but I’m intrigued by this question in general.
Hi! First post on here. The conversion/adapter tools exists. It's not a technical issue. The problem is that cobol applications are normally monolithic, and a migration to another system represents an huge risk because: 1) you migrate like a Big Bang migration, or; 2) you migrate step by step. Imagine a bank with applications running at 30 or 40 years without problems... Nobody in his perfect judgment will accept to…
> Hi! First post on here.
Welcome, and very nice post. :)
Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K. These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master COBOL now? How about salaries?
FTFY.
No programming language requires proximity. The only jobs you can expect to never be offshored are in (literal) plumbing.
This said, anything involved with Very Big Companies is probably more at risk, because it makes more sense for them to move entire departments offshore just to save a few percentage points on aggregate costs (actual productivity be damned). So I expect this will soon happen to the likes of Salesforce, if it's not already. AWS is definitely already happening.
Also anything getting too mainstream, because then it makes sense for outsourcers to invest in training high numbers of people. I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, now that it's making real inroads in the enterprise space (with bigdata etc).
I really dislike slotting things down to a language. If you are proficient in the underlying programming concepts, the language simply does not matter with the right amount of motivation.
So someone with a strong competency in C#, PHP, or JavaScript should be able to write Assembly? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I feel like there's a piece there that's missing.
I can't tell if this is in the article as it's paywalled, but a company in York recently put up an advert for £20k/year for Cobol programmers with no programming experience required, doubling at the end of the training period.
Is that a livable wage there?