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IBM will offer free COBOL training

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Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#131

Post by tgflynn »

pm90 wrote: post #51
dm319 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a healthcare worker who also has an interest in programming - why does this comment not surprise me in HN? If a worldwide pandemic doesn't make you reflect on problems in our societal structure - that our key workers are the most poorly paid, but part of a necessary backbone of any country, and that the most over-paid workers are often the least 'key' at times like this - then I guess nothing will. But sure, the s…

“the most over-paid workers are often the least key”. The ONLY reason that social distancing is an effective option is because so much is possible online and that all that infrastructure is good enough to handle the surge in traffic that they are currently experiencing. Imagine an alternate world in which these services were not as competent.

I don't know about that. I suspect that most of the truly essential work (health care, driving trucks/trains, keeping power plants running, producing food and toilet paper, etc.) still can't be done from home.

I also think that, precisely because of that, social distancing will only slow the rate of exponential growth, not prevent it.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#132

Post by vageli »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #48
brnt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just finished a contract with a hospital that built a lot of stuff in house in the 80ies based on a C (still pre C89 in many places) and Delphi/Pascal. The problem is indeed volume (over 10MLoC), two or three wizards supporting it all, but firmly coding like it's '83. No training of newcomers whatsoever, and thus really no way to contribute. If you manage to get some support, it will be once a year and in the form of…

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…

> 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 running, and they won't help others train up. That seems a very difficult situation for the suits to deal with, even if they want to.

This sounds _exactly_ like a failing of management to me. If developers are expected or allowed to "just code" without documenting anything or training anyone, management is absolutely to blame for allowing it to go on.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#133

Post by bdavis__ »

FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #129
bdavis__ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose that most of the code written in the old days, in COBOL in particular, was not done by computer scientists. There were many lanes for learning COBOL, and they included community colleges and industry training courses. The amount of "computer science / software engineering" concepts that were widely known (or even possible) in those days was very limited. 're-engineering' the code is a valid operation, but t…

This is true. Back in the day, COBOL was marketed to businiess people as an easy to learn code to just get stuff done. Serious programming was done with FORTRAN.

still true today. (not really, but there is a lot of f77 out there...)

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#134

Post by forinti »

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…

Now imagine 30 years from now when you are going to have to track down the documentation for version X of the web framework for version Y of some language and version Z of frontend framework.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#135

Post by marktangotango »

Someone1234 wrote: post #96

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 starti…

This is exactly true. The pay is this low because there is a glut of cheap cobol developers in the US due to decades of off shoring. There have been 2000+ cobol developers laid off here over the past 5 years alone (medium midwest metro).

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#136

Post by salamanderman »

It's very frustrating to me that we're even talking about these COBOL programs today. During Y2K there was suddenly a huge demand for COBOL programmers to come out of retirement and young programmers to frantically learn it. The claim I remember at the time was that those systems should have already been rewritten, but the departments were underfunded, and they were finally doing it since it was an emergency. And yet, all they did was a little hacky patch and 20 years later it's still running. So we're 40-60 years on with these pieces of software. Look for whatever hacks they made for Y2K to be biting people in the butt again in 20-40 years, and programming historians to be pulled out of universities to patch again.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#137

Post by ravenstine »

Unless they are going to pay me way above my current pay to compensate for dealing with an obsoslete language and the programming practices of its era, no way.

This is a great non-monetary example of one of the biggest issues we are seeing in our time. That is, as a civilization, we have become terrible at investing in future contingencies. In the last few months, we have witnessed how our biases prevented most of us(and businesses) from building up a meaningful savings for stormy weather, and the COBOL situation is hardly different. Banks could have invested in gradually switching from older mainframes to modern ones with software built with any modern language, and they were(or should have been) in one of the best positions to do this. Instead, they said "whatever" or simply were complacent in where technology was headed, and did little or nothing.

As a society in it's current state, we need to seriously look at ourselves in the mirror.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#138

Post by jerf »

forinti wrote: post #134
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…

Now imagine 30 years from now when you are going to have to track down the documentation for version X of the web framework for version Y of some language and version Z of frontend framework.

So... don't do that.

There are plenty of options that have a reasonable probability of being stable.

(Also, consider committing the docs right in to the repo. In the 1970s such an idea would have been absurd. Today, a lot of my projects technically already have this, thanks to vendoring and docs embedded into the programs themselves.)

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#139

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> modern engineering practices

Heck, I’d be willing to settle for seeing modern software languages used with modern engineering practices.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#140

Post by Red-Ted »

rbanffy wrote: post #72
alxtt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you hire people like this you need to involve HR in better selecting who the org hires.

I've made a point of not hiring intersectional people in general been burnt before by employees who care more about 'woke' politics then actually getting the job done.
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