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Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

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Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#41

Post by SuperPaintMan »

Another issue with COBOL (Apart from being unsexy and verbose) is simply getting access to a proper mainframe environment. You could pick up COBBOL using something like GNU Cobol or similar but it's working in the z/OS environment that is needed and understanding the various system facilities and how they interact. MTM is pretty much one of the only ways to get access to a recent version of z/OS to test on (the other being shelling out 2K/yr for IBM LMS access).

In a age when most things come with snazzy oneliners and docker images trying to learn COBOL is an esoteric endevour. The language has its warts and quirks, but it's nothing too crazy. Same with TSO and learning JCL, it's orthogonal to the current landscape.

(Not saying I wouldn't love to be doing in here in Canada)

Fun fact: The current version of IBM Cobol has JSON GENERATE and JSON PARSE, so you can whip up endpoints that interact directly with a mainframe (as long as your convert the code page at the network boundary). Never thought I'd be able to use React and Cobol backed by DB2 in 2018.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#42

Post by paganel »

toyg wrote: post #28
raincom wrote: post #3

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?

> How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master 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 (actua…

> AWS is definitely already happening.

Can confirm, I live in the capital city of an Eastern European country and I've been approached by a AWS recruiter a couple of months ago, she told me they were about to open a big new office in here. I think they were quite desperate to get their share of hirings because they had approached me even though there was no mention on my LinkedIn profile of C++ or Java, which was a major part of the job requirements.

> I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers,

Fortunately or not there aren't that many Python programmers out here to speak of (I'm talking about Eastern Europe, maybe things in India and South-East Asia are different). I should know, because I've been programming Python for a living for 13 years now and the market for Python programmers isn't a large one. Yeah, I did ok, as in there are small shops that pay decent money for Python programmers, and from time to time there's even a big outsourcing company desperate to hire Python programmers because a new foreign client has arrived with a Python project on their doorsteps, but more often than not Python is still looked as a "scripting language" and as a "programming language for non-important and non-enterprisey stuff".

Just recently a friend of mine that used to work for a major outsourcer based in this area (they have big Western clients, you probably interact with some of their code each day) told me that their company puts people like Python programmers that they intend to hire on a special list (and probably Ruby programmers, too), as in they're not seen as long-term employees, more like project-based (see the part above about Python projects coming from foreign clients), as the focus is mostly on Java and probably some C# and C++, but mostly Java.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#43

Post by ryandrake »

guitarbill wrote: post #5

> 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…

Just more “evidence” to support the long running Shortage Of Engineers™ narrative. Just because the topic is COBOL doesn’t mean it’s not a submarine promoting all the usual things like outsourcing, more H1B visas, and over-saturation of STEM graduates.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#44

Post by nappy-doo »

PNT510 wrote: post #36
pavel_lishin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I don't know anything about York, and am honestly not even sure what the £:$ conversion is at the moment. (Being paid to learn a skill from scratch does sound pretty objectively good, though.)

I think the conversion is somewhere around 1 pound to 1.30 in dollars. So 26k for training and 52k afterwards.

Forget India. People should outsource to the UK.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#45

Post by wiz21c »

Another thing is that the mainframe vendors use their locking to get a lot of money. So some companies want to leave that, except they can't because the business logic written in COBOL works well. Therefore, the company let most of its COBOL workforce go, keep some old guys to maintain programs and divert investment to other platforms. When the old maintenance crew will be dying, businesses will have had time to move out of the mainframe. That's what I see at a few government agencies in my country : COBOL is still alive, but it's just slowly dying and nobody invest in it anymore. And the jobs associated to it are labelled as "maintenance", good luck getting a pay rise.

Tips : Oracle feels the same, we're moving to Posgtresql wherever possible. So my career path is basically set : Java will stay on top because there's no language that is better in my segment (batch processing, long lived code, just a hell of a business logic, thousands of rules) and Oracle will be pushed out by in place replacement like postgres. I'm gonna die in an open source world :-)

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#46

Post by thrower123 »

nappy-doo wrote: post #44
PNT510 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the conversion is somewhere around 1 pound to 1.30 in dollars. So 26k for training and 52k afterwards.

Forget India. People should outsource to the UK.

I'm not sure if you are being tongue-in-cheek or not, but it's at least a workable idea. Outsourcing in my experience is an almost unredeemable shitshow, with far, far more misses than hits, but going the cheapest possible route is much more expensive in the long run. The timeshift between US and British working hours is a lot more convenient, if nothing more.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#47

Post by pavel_lishin »

nappy-doo wrote: post #44
PNT510 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the conversion is somewhere around 1 pound to 1.30 in dollars. So 26k for training and 52k afterwards.

Forget India. People should outsource to the UK.

People absolutely are - one of my previous employers moved a large development team to Belfast, and another team has a team in Dublin (not the UK, but presumably their rates aren't too wildly different.)

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#48

Post by pavel_lishin »

tclancy wrote: post #20
pavel_lishin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? With training, of course, and time to ramp up. Assembly isn't Linear A.

How can you be sure?

Of which part? That a programmer can learn another language, or that Linear A isn't just an obscure programming language written down with stick on clay bricks?

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#49

Post by yashap »

exabrial wrote: post #38

I could learn COBOL; I've had to take classes in my undergrad and one of my careers involved it. There's a couple of reasons why I dont: * Putting my career on a trajectory where I am using a dying technology. Unless it paid 3x-5x what I could make using a JVM language (my current career path), the risk/reward isn't there. So market forces will need to drive the cost of salaries up even farther before I consider a ju…

And really, it’ll probably pay A LOT less than you make using a JVM language, not more.

Re: Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You

#50

Post by logfromblammo »

bovermyer wrote: post #14
mbrumlow wrote: post #12

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'd presume that anyone with a BS in computer science should be able to write assembly for at least one RISC architecture.

I'd also presume that more companies would ask them to do so than those who have legitimate business reasons to write something in assembly. We are long past the age of resource-constrained architecture hacks. The closest most people should be getting to metal is ANSI/ISO C, and the others are all writing compilers or doing extreme optimization stunts.

Can I write in assembly? Yes. Should I write in assembly? Hell no.

Those companies that still require COBOL/mainframe programmers have had literally decades to watch the center of mass of the software industry move away from that, and then still make a conscious decision to pursue a dead-end path to obsolescence.

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