I went to community technical college in 2005 and the primary course load was COBOL and JAVA. The college was a pipeline to to bring fresh COBOL talent into these big financial institutions. I'm not sure how many colleges are doing this across the USA currently, but I'm sure there are a handful.
COBOL – Still standing the test of time
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#42My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting part-time contract work, something to keep her busy. She got flooded by recruiters. They all told her the same story: "Big Corp" is nervous because a critical system runs COBOL and the staff that used to support it have all either retired or died. She decided a…
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#43My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting part-time contract work, something to keep her busy. She got flooded by recruiters. They all told her the same story: "Big Corp" is nervous because a critical system runs COBOL and the staff that used to support it have all either retired or died. She decided a…
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#44My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting part-time contract work, something to keep her busy. She got flooded by recruiters. They all told her the same story: "Big Corp" is nervous because a critical system runs COBOL and the staff that used to support it have all either retired or died. She decided a…
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
They are. The largest bank here in Sweden for example offers a 6 month free COBOL Academy to newly graduated students, that ends in basically a guaranteed job.
I guess there just aren't enough takers.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#45> Cobol remains the language of choice
Sigh , those single liner that both illustrate the ignorance and the status of the author.
I’m an enterprise architect in banking , 6 month ago I was hired for IT Transformation.
My mission was very simple « move the bank the out of mainframe »
In 2 weeks or so I presented a Kafka based runtime based with JVM contracts that would enable the bank to perform in a near real-time manner as opposed to « batch » processing while covering and simplifying 90% of banks related scenario ( SEPA , MasterCard , AML etc...)
The project was accepted by directors but devs refused to go into that because much like the authors they are 30 years in the banks and don’t want to learn something else than what they know « cobol ».
90% of our contractors work is spent dealing with mainframe constraint and writing interfaces and top of that piece of crap that can only process data at night or during the weekend.
Mainframe is not there because « it’s superior » , distributed system have largely proven their capability and maturity.
Mainframe are still there because of Corporates Politics and lack of Leadership from top management.
When you are reminded that Citibank lost 0.5 Billions because they spent 0$ on their UI, you may start to understand how much corporates world is rotten to its core and why mainframe is still there.
Has nothing to do with it’s capability , period.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
They are. The largest bank here in Sweden for example offers a 6 month free COBOL Academy to newly graduated students, that ends in basically a guaranteed job. I guess there just aren't enough takers.
That's very good. I never saw these in Montreal. Maybe because I'm not a new graduate.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
Good point. Maybe new developer salary is different from what contractors get? The number I see for contractors are pretty good but yeah they have decades of experience under their belt.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
The contract offers my mother received involved good money, but that was actually part of the problem. She got the impression that most of the managers at "Big Corp" had little/no regard for these "critical" systems; they were just looking to save their own jobs, either by way of a miracle worker (wave a magic wand and fix 40 years of tech debt in 3 months) or a fall guy (it's the contractor's fault, not mine).
Also, COBOL work is kinda crap. Debugging 20-year-old Java code sucks, but a 40-year-old COBOL project, with source code backed up to 5-inch floppy disks - forget about it. (I just watched the trailer for 'The Many Saints of Newark'. LOL)
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the field of tech is more segmented than many realize (in terms of culture, technology, even geography to an extent) For example, I've got a decent-sized network and I've only ever met one person who works in government tech. And it wasn't through that network. But you can't tell me the government doesn't have legions of people working on its systems. Even talking with this friend about work is like speaking…
100%. SAP is another ERP parallel universe, with its own language (ABAP), industry certification schemes, conferences, publications, culture... These vendors specialize in solving the nexus of unfun problems that sit at the heart of every large organization (invoicing & expenses, accounting, payroll, budgeting & forecasting, financial statements…) and I believe them to be quite well insulated from the forces of open…
> because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative
I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience is highly risk-adverse, and the problem domain is highly risk-prone. There's an enormous incentive to go with an industry "known good" even if you know you're getting thrown over a barrel.
ERP conversion are highly, highly likely to fail in terms of on-budget, on-time (more so than the general abysmal record of IT projects). Lack of business ownership/knowledge of processes and requirements is usually at the heart of it, IME. I've been through a couple SAP implementations, a couple SAP upgrades, and conversions to other platforms in my earlier life (Deltek, Dynamics), and they are truly the worst projects on the planet to do.
In the government contracting space, Deltek (which most have never even heard of) is such a winner with accounting departments because they're playing to government auditors - the level of scrutiny from just saying "we run Deltek" compared to some roll-your-own solution is miles of difference and ultimate cost. I don't have any relationship with or love for Deltek, btw, this is just my IRL observation and an example of what the "customer" is thinking about - they could care less about technology stack.
I think most finance departments just "mind the machine" they have - it's really rare (again, IME) to find people in a finance department who have expert knowledge of the key business processes, report audiences/dependencies, and how everything ties together. You can throw a ton of business analysts at it and still find dark corners that went unaddressed after or the night before go-live. And you're impacting things like payroll, benefits calculations, vendor payments, invoicing, taxation, etc. High risk stuff to kludge up.
Re: COBOL – Still standing the test of time
#50Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? It seems like the teachers tale of someone cracking their head open while swinging on their chair - presumably they exist but there can't be that many of them?
My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect, but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's job" so maybe that's it.
Not that it's germane to gender-balance of 'greyhairs', but COBOL was invented by a woman, Grace Hopper, after all. I'm not sure I can think of a new mainstream language initially authored by a female these days.