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IBM will offer free COBOL training

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Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#91

Post by AzzieElbab »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #66
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possibly not a management problem at the core? I mean, I know exactly what you mean about suits like to ignore the future, but I've worked with a few 'wizards' who, once they've got the job under their belt, use it to keep other people out. They'll not comment, help, document or whatever, and once they're doing that, they are uncontrollable. They can't be sacked because they're the only ones keeping the system…

well if you have 3 guys that are the wizards that can't be sacked, hire 3 contractors for a year long project to document things sufficiently that these guys become more sackable. Contractors of course have to be highly experienced as well, and well-remunerated, so maybe management doesn't want to go down that expensive avenue, which means it's a management problem. Not to mention the years where they did not comment…

In the real world this approach will most likely lead to getting 6 indestructible wizards instead of 3. Magical staff that needs to be supported by wizards should be shipped to Hogwarts and replaced

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#92

Post by ghaff »

altitudinous wrote: post #75
jazzyjackson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting to me that systems could be written that function correctly once they go live and don't have to be taken offline for decades... the architecture, not the language

This really, really interests me as well, and I've written my iOS apps the same way too. They have no server side, no real dependencies, all client based and fully automated internally - so as well as being fully contained they schedule required notifications etc into the future without my intervention. As long as the user runs the app once about every four months (which isn't an issue given they get many notificatio…

>(which isn't an issue given they get many notifications during that four months)

I assume users can turn notifications off though? Almost nothing on my iPhone is allowed to send me notifications.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#93

Post by lowercased »

alxtt wrote: post #70
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first suggestion might work, but having been there I know obnoxious programmers can be very obstructive, and put up some major barriers to newbies. That said, I think yours is a good solution if it can be afforded. Per your 2nd point about long-term management problems, no doubt of it at all, but sometimes the new (and sometimes good) management simply inherits what previous mismanagement left behind. Also perha…

The other side of the coin is that new hires can be very obstructive. 80% of new hires here are relentless politicians who snitch to management that they are "underappreciated" while making one idiotic suggestion after the next to show their relevance. In reality they cannot do anything, so they scheme to get rid of people who can. During the battle no useful work is being done.

not that that doesn't happen, but in the context of the thread here, I imagine it wouldn't happen (or be more rare). You're needing to hire senior COBOL experts, and the 'senior' part is where the sort of behavior you're describing doesn't happen as much. Usually it's a mixture of confidence in your own ability, a dislike of politics, and an assurance that you can get work someplace else if/when you decide to leave.

The people that 'snitch' and feel 'under appreciated', and so on... my experience is they have trouble keeping work, are afraid of being found out, and do what they can to get rid of others who can recognize their lack of skills. I just don't think you'd find as many of those getting hired in the context of the needs of this thread.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#94

Post by brnt »

zhte415 wrote: post #89
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possibly not a management problem at the core? I mean, I know exactly what you mean about suits like to ignore the future, but I've worked with a few 'wizards' who, once they've got the job under their belt, use it to keep other people out. They'll not comment, help, document or whatever, and once they're doing that, they are uncontrollable. They can't be sacked because they're the only ones keeping the system…

I worked with a guy like this. He bragged he was the only one that knew the entire legacy codebase and he only shared parts with colleagues on his pretty sizable team to ensure he had a job and fat salary for life. The the multinational decides a change in direction and fired the entire office, relocating it for regional diversification (this was not offshoring, spreading the work out across multiple teams). This was…

Indeed, the word wizard was perhaps ill-chosen. These guys know this particular codebase, in all it's hairy glory, but not much else.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#95

Post by lowercased »

Cyberdog wrote: post #85
wyclif wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These New Jersey and elsewhere new COBOL jobs are all volunteer, they are not paid jobs?

I am curious about this as well. If we take this "volunteer" word being used in these articles at face value, it means these states are asking for people to work on their systems for free… you've got to be frickin' kidding me. It's such a preposterous idea that I can only believe that it must have been an error or misinterpretation at some level which has entered into and lingered in the news zeitgeist like a fart in…

They might mean 'volunteer' like people 'volunteer' for the army in the US. you get paid, and get the tools provided, etc., but you're not going to be forced out of your current life and conscripted in to COBOL work.

It's a bad word though, because it creates these confusions. However, they might be at a max of existing COBOL 'full timers'. Who would 'volunteer' to leave their current dev roles to jump in to the NJ COBOL life? Might mean moving to NJ as well...

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#96

Post by Someone1234 »

The IRS, treasury, and others locally are looking for COBOL programmers. I can explain why they're struggling to find any just by looking at the pay scale: $30,113 - $86,021 (GS-5 through GS-12, and most won't get the top end of the GS-12 scale). The $30K GS-5 starting is almost as low as working for their call center which is farcical.

By contrast state, county, and even city government are paying $65K - $85K starting going all the way up to $100K at the top end. And these are jobs where you're doing modern development, not COBOL.

People will start learning COBOL as soon as it makes rational sense. As it stands a lot of organizations aren't looking for any COBOL developer, they're looking for CHEAP COBOL developers. It doesn't make sense to learn when you'd lose money for taking those jobs.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#97

Post by [deleted] »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #55
irrational wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you get them otherwise? There are way more jobs than qualified developers. Why would anyone want to work on an antiquated technology stack like Cobol? By the time they get up to speed on fixing the Cobol systems, the pandemic will be over. The real solution is to think long term and rewrite all of these antiquated systems so that the next time there is an emergency it will be much simpler to find qualified d…

>> Why would anyone want to work on an antiquated technology stack like Cobol? Because it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. I did a year in a Cobol shop as a graduate developer at a large financial corporation. Working on a mainframe was the most fun I had on that job. And why not? You're logging on to a gigantic computer with millions of users and billions of transactions daily, with a text-based user interface tha…

[deleted]

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#98

Post by lowercased »

guessbest wrote: post #43
laurentdc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the devs I met with the most stable and laid back jobs are all AS400, COBOL/CICS or IBM RPG experts

That's probably because they work in isolation from newer technologies which are constantly adding business rules. Most of the mainframe work I see involves maintaining old code bases and handling batch processing.

good guess. if the rest of the organization bends over backwards to ensure that you never have to update your code to accommodate, say, more than 8 ASCII characters in a password, or hashed passwords, and the rest of the org puts their security at risk to make sure your codebase never has to change... yeah, it might be a bit laid back... :)

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#99

Post by jlokier »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #55
irrational wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you get them otherwise? There are way more jobs than qualified developers. Why would anyone want to work on an antiquated technology stack like Cobol? By the time they get up to speed on fixing the Cobol systems, the pandemic will be over. The real solution is to think long term and rewrite all of these antiquated systems so that the next time there is an emergency it will be much simpler to find qualified d…

>> Why would anyone want to work on an antiquated technology stack like Cobol? Because it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. I did a year in a Cobol shop as a graduate developer at a large financial corporation. Working on a mainframe was the most fun I had on that job. And why not? You're logging on to a gigantic computer with millions of users and billions of transactions daily, with a text-based user interface tha…

> Fifty years from now people will be making jokes about "that antiquated Python stack" and state agencies will be ringing alarm bells for the lack of experienced young Python programmers.

I wonder how many people realise Python is more than 30 years old already.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#100

Post by edw519 »

watt wrote: post #21

It's a trap. The problem with those old codebases that governments, hospitals, big businesses are struggling with is not really the language, it's the engineering practices of that time with regards to constraints of old technology. The language is not the problem - lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it, is. It would be very interest…

lack of comments, bad variable naming, bad structure (little or no procedures or readability), and just sheer volume of it

This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people. For all the progress we've made with technology in the past 50 years, we've made little or no progress with any of the items in this list.

The second biggest problem building software has always been programmers too small for the task at hand.

The biggest problem has been managers who are even smaller.

So don't blame COBOL or any other technology. Fix the people and you can build anything excellent from almost any tech.

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