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IBM will offer free COBOL training

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Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#201

Post by fastaguy88 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #106
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…

“Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.” Which is to say that these are organizations that have been sitting on this problem for thirty or more years, doing nothing about it, and suddenly they cannot handle the load due to THEIR greed, apathy, and incompetence. But programmers are meant to queue up and work for free in order to fix it because it is now a "crisis" of their intentional ma…

This comment seems to ignore who the "they/THEIR" are. The organization that choose not to invest in unemployment benefits IT was the voters and taxpayers of New Jersey/"name that state".

Yes, it might be nice to have voters with more foresight and long term horizons who don't mind paying higher taxes. But lets not blame some nameless profit centered corporation.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#202

Post by tehjoker »

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…

Maybe if job security were a real thing, those guys wouldn't create obstructions to guarantee it. If employees don't get loyalty from management, why should the street go one way?

The problem is that management doesn't care about the human cost of their decisions and it causes technical problems.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#203

Post by nkassis »

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…

Pay scales are idiotic on purpose to force the government to fail to hire required employees and pay 5 times as much by hiring a private sector company. This is all working as designed.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#204

Post by coleca »

lowercased wrote: post #95
Cyberdog wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

The NJ site actually asks if you plan to seek compensation and that compensation would have to comply with state procurement laws. So don’t expect boku $$$ for these jobs. They want freebies. There’s no shortage of COBOL devs just a shortage of people willing to pay for them or pay market rates.

https://form.jotform.com/200966530056150

Why aren’t we asking other government employees to volunteer for free?

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#205

Post by cat199 »

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…

anyone familiar with current node/npm/front end web dev would have very little trouble dismantling the false notions of implicit chronological progress belying this argument.

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#206

Post by prirun »

COBOL programs are divided into paragraphs that start with a paragraph name and have a group of statements within the paragraph. A program starts at the first paragraph and continues sequentially through multiple paragraphs until a STOP RUN statement is executed or it executes the last statement in the last paragraph. Easy peasy.

Well, not so fast. If you PERFORM a paragraph, then it's like a BASIC GOSUB statement, or "jump and store" in assembly language. Sort of like a function call, but with no local variables.

Or you can do PERFORM A THRU B to jump to paragraph A, continuing sequentially until the end of paragraph B.

Or you can do PERFORM A THRU B VARYING X FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL C, which is sort of like a for loop.

The nasty thing about all this is that looking at a paragraph (block of code), you can't tell shit about how it gets executed. Does it fall through to the next paragraph? You can't tell: that's determined dynamically at runtime. Is it a loop? Can't tell. That's one of the things that makes large COBOL programs really hard to understand.

Another fun COBOL statement is ALTER:

https://riptutorial.com/cobol/example/19820/a-contrived-exam...

If you think GOTO is bad, it's a walk in the park compared to the lethal combination of ALTER + GOTO. Basically, when you say GO TO A, it can go to some other place based on a previous ALTER statement. Now we're having fun!

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#207

Post by johnmertic »

Endlessly wrote: post #4

Here is the official description & link to the course: “Open Source COBOL Training – a brand new open source course designed to teach COBOL to beginners and refresh experienced professionals. IBM worked with clients and an institute of higher education to develop an in-depth COBOL Programming with VSCode course that will be available next week on the public domain at no charge to anyone. This curriculum will be made…

I'll also add the Open Mainframe Project blog post here as well...

https://www.openmainframeproject.org/blog/2020/04/09/open-ma...

A few other bits to clarify things ( coming from me being Director of the Open Mainframe Project )...

- The coursework itself is being contributed to a new open source project being hosted by Open Mainframe Project ( CC-BY-40 license ).

- We would have liked it to be ready at the time of announcement, but it literally got approved by the Open Mainframe Project TAC as a new project about an hour before the blog post went live ;-). Have no fear, it should be landing next week ( there will be a bit of work to come on translating docx files to markdown, in case anyone wants to help ).

- Right now the course work focused on VS Code as an editor, but the project is very open to contributions that leverage other IDEs ( such as Eclipse Che, Atom, etc )

- Open Mainframe Project is part of the Linux Foundation, with IBM being one of the 30+ sponsoring organizations.

- On the notes I've seen around "hey let's rewrite all that COBOL code in some modern language", I won't add more fuel to that fire ;-). I will however say there is some interesting work in a project hosted by Open Mainframe Project called Zowe ( https://zowe.org ), which basically makes connecting to mainframe apps and data on z/OS much easier ( think REST APIs, CLI interface you can use on your laptop, App framework for creating browser based apps, etc ).

Anyways - hope this helps! Feel free to ping me if you want more details or help getting engaged ( @jmertic on Twitter ).

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#208

Post by mycall »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #83
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…

Not to mention GOTO. If your one of the people who hyperventilates when you see a goto because you learned that it was considered harmful in programmer school then Cobol might not be for you. ;) You might be surprised about the comments though - depending on the age of the codebase. Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off…

> Mainframes were rented back in the day, you paid by resources consumed, terminal time was precious, and mainframes were often turned off outside business hours.

Sounds very cloud

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#209

Post by ralphc »

Forget the talk about pay too high, too low. This is a way to help our neighbors who are hurting, a way to help with our skills.

A question I'll ask is, someone like me; retired from a long development career, experience in many languages but not COBOL. Could I take this course, or a similar one, and be useful to prop up a rickety code base on a volunteer basis? If yes, are any of these states allowing remote work on it?

Re: IBM will offer free COBOL training

#210

Post by JustARandomGuy »

Cyberdog wrote: post #88
quickthrower2 wrote: post #46

Next: COBOL 30 day bootcamp with guaranteed job at the end.

I'd say yes to that in a heartbeat. Thirty days is probably not enough to someone new to programming, but to experienced programmers in various other languages it's probably enough to get the basics down and get over the "know just enough to be dangerous" hump. If these orgs desperate for devs want to put their money where their mouth is and start a program like that, hit me up. Sure.

I'd sign up for something like that in a heartbeat.

I used to do COBOL, but the problem is that possibilities for advancement are very limited - there's far more jobs available - and promotion pathways - for a Python or Java coder than there is for a COBOL coder.

In exchange for a refresher in COBOL and a guaranteed job, yes that is a much better deal.

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