51–60 of 104 posts
Earlier 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.
Has 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?
I worked with some at a bank (of course). Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server and it's incredible how some old names in IT can still charge enormous fees for some very old software.
My 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.
My 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.
The old -- and likely not so bad -- advice if you'd like to learn how to use a Mainframe is: Get access to a one, get a copy of latest Red Book [2], and start playing around :)
[1]: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore (this isn't the program I went through, but my old bookmark now redirects here)
[2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html (IBMs mainframe Technical Guides traditionally have a red cover)
My 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.
My 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.
Has 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?
I've met quite a few. I spent a year in a mainframe team in Amex and I worked in COBOL, JCL and REXX. I preferred REXX, but COBOL is not that bad. JCL is a horror. I worked in that team in 2016. The median age in the team was around 40 ish but there were a few outliers, including myself and a couple of others. I was also acquainted with many dozens of third-party contractors who worked for Amex programming mainframes.
If you haven't met many COBOL programmers yourself, the reason might be that a) you've never worked in a big financial corp and b) you don't hang out with programmers from big contractor companies a lot.
To clarify, most of my career in the industry before and after that I was working with more modern languages, like C# and Python.
The thing about the "average line of code" is that a line of COBOL rarely does much. You can do a lot more with a line of Java and, of course, with a line of Perl or Python you can do very complex things.