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Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

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Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#41

Post by dotxlem »

seanhunter wrote: post #7

The idea that COBOL is at the heart of bank systems is a persistent myth that gets published every now and again alongside some story about how essential these systems are, how they can never be replaced and how the people maintaining these systems are a dieing breed. Almost all of this seems untrue (except maybe the last one). I’ve worked at a variety of banks from front to back office across securities and private…

You’ve never encountered COBOL because it sounds like you’ve never worked on the part which is usually referred to as the “core banking system”.

Many legacy banking cores are still in use and the legacy ones are all written in COBOL.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#42

Post by nologic01 »

Large parts of financial industry IT are just in a hopeless, terminal state.

There are a few exceptions of organizations that have serious in-house knowledge (mostly select parts of investment banks) but, by-and-large, this sector has never really thought of information technology as being core to its mission. So everything related to information processing has been outsourced, from Microsoft's excel, to IBM's mainframes and COBOL. In this world Java is the epitome of sophistication and modernity.

It is a monumental error in vision and leadership given that finance is nothing but information processing. In any other sector this level of incompetence would have brought swift and merciful disruption and obsolescence. But this is not any other sector.

This is the highly-regulated inner sanctum where society keeps its precious Monetary State. As the experience with crypto amply demonstrates, leave that door ajar to fast-talking, white-paper writing financial "innovators" and a madhouse ensues in dt.

It is entirely unclear how things will develop as the last COBOL developers retire to blissfully sail around the Balearics. Maybe banks will move from COBOL to blockchain, asking chatGPT for instructions every step of the way.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#43

Post by rpigab »

I'm 31 and my first job was in COBOL for a big mortgage company.

To me, it's impossible that people lack COBOL skills, I was ready to push code to production in less than a week, so I started with a one-week self-teach COBOL which included the specifics of working with this particular mortgage company with its way of naming files, separating DB2 SQL requests in files, never using GOTOs, etc.

So when I see this kind of news, once or twice a year, I know it's probably more about sysadmins willing to run mainframes, setting up compilers and stuff, JCLs scripts, relational and hierarchical databases, than just developing in COBOL. Of course there's also the problem that nobody wants to learn and write COBOL when there's "good" and "pleasant" modern languages around. But that can be solved with a 20%-30% increase in salary (and I don't think they are actually paid more than other devs at least nowadays in my area (France), so it's probably fine for now).

PS: It gets better, I'm a web developer now, only did 1 yr of COBOL. Good to know it exists, and some people are miserable, makes you enjoy simple things, don't take anything for granted.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#44

Post by dagw »

kqr wrote: post #38
dagw wrote: post #31

The largest bank in Sweden offers a free 16 week COBOL course once or twice a year. Basically anybody that passes is virtually guaranteed a job there.

Wait, really? I briefly looked at Cobol job ads in Sweden (just for fun to see what's out there -- not actually looking for a Cobol job right now) recently and they were all looking for people with multiple years of production Cobol maintenance. I must have missed something obvious.

https://sebgroup.com/sv/karriar/vem-ar-du/nyexaminerade-och-...

Only formal requirement to apply is some professional development experience or a degree in something programming related.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#45

Post by pc86 »

jve wrote: post #5
anonzzzies wrote: post #2

As many said before ; it’s not learning Cobol (or Fortran), it’s the weird IBM mainframe/OS ecosystem that is the problem. I am good at both languages, but I know very little about the ecosystem it runs in.

As a Millennial, I haven't ever seen/touched/used a mainframe. And I work in a modern Data Center. What are the pros/cons of mainframe? What makes them better than a rack housed with necessary hardware? Well, I can see cons - not so accessible as regular hardware. Impractical/impossible to have at house. So the learning curve for hobbyists/tinkerers/curious are missing first steps.

I'm about as old as you can be and still be considered a millennial and I've only run into mainframes twice in the wild, at my 1st and 3rd jobs. The 1st was that way because they were leasing the software written in FORTRAN by 1 guy in the 70s and doing a couple very small things on top. All the core edits had to go through that one guy (this was ca. 2009 or so), it was basically a black box with a 6+ week turnaround for even minor changes. 3rd was for a warehouse management system and logistics shop that was so old they had multiple full-time employees whose job title was "Computer Operator" and basically just babysat the mainframe - zero programming, sysadmin, or networking skills, I still have no idea what they actually did but whatever it was it was enough for 3 or 4 full-time people.

Despite the Computer Operators, the advertised pros of the mainframe are often very little maintenance and being able to write code and let it run for months or years without interruption. I've heard the performance is also very very good.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#46

Post by vincheezel »

skissane wrote: post #20
seanhunter wrote: post #7

The idea that COBOL is at the heart of bank systems is a persistent myth that gets published every now and again alongside some story about how essential these systems are, how they can never be replaced and how the people maintaining these systems are a dieing breed. Almost all of this seems untrue (except maybe the last one). I’ve worked at a variety of banks from front to back office across securities and private…

> Almost all of this seems untrue (except maybe the last one). I’ve worked at a variety of banks from front to back office across securities and private wealth. I’ve seen plenty of company-specific languages, plenty of C++, Java, perl, python but have literally never encountered a COBOL system. Two of Australia's four biggest banks – ANZ and Westpac – have historically run CSC Hogan. I don't know what they are doing…

>westpac

(Not so) fun fact, Westpacs account password policy requires the following:

6 characters. Not minimum. 6 exactly. (!!!)

Includes at least 1 number and one letter

No special characters, spaces or repeating characters

And it’s case insensitive! Very convenient indeed if your caps lock is broken or something

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#47

Post by [deleted] »

rpigab wrote: post #43

I'm 31 and my first job was in COBOL for a big mortgage company. To me, it's impossible that people lack COBOL skills, I was ready to push code to production in less than a week, so I started with a one-week self-teach COBOL which included the specifics of working with this particular mortgage company with its way of naming files, separating DB2 SQL requests in files, never using GOTOs, etc. So when I see this kind o…

[deleted]

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#48

Post by softgrow »

COBOL at least for me, is quite readable. I've worked with code (not in a bank) that processes binary records in a quite readable way allowed porting the functionality to C++. Comments from the people who wrote it that it wasn't that hard when you put your mind to it. JCL is another matter though.

Maybe the headline should be shortage of developers who can work with poorly documented legacy code for low wages.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#49

Post by samarthr1 »

dotxlem wrote: post #41
seanhunter wrote: post #7

The idea that COBOL is at the heart of bank systems is a persistent myth that gets published every now and again alongside some story about how essential these systems are, how they can never be replaced and how the people maintaining these systems are a dieing breed. Almost all of this seems untrue (except maybe the last one). I’ve worked at a variety of banks from front to back office across securities and private…

You’ve never encountered COBOL because it sounds like you’ve never worked on the part which is usually referred to as the “core banking system”. Many legacy banking cores are still in use and the legacy ones are all written in COBOL.

You will be happy to know that in India at least, the big CBS (finacle) is in poorly written Java instead.

Made on least cost basis, protected by a moat a central bank wide, and maintained by 10k /year engineers, it is truly a marvel that our country's banks even run.

The company i intern at has built its entire business off moving as much functionality outside finacle. A small modification of changing a label's font, can cost a full 100-150 usd.

Never mind adding in custom features and the like, which costs a pretty penny if you use infy.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#50

Post by nubinetwork »

vincheezel wrote: post #46
skissane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost all of this seems untrue (except maybe the last one). I’ve worked at a variety of banks from front to back office across securities and private wealth. I’ve seen plenty of company-specific languages, plenty of C++, Java, perl, python but have literally never encountered a COBOL system. Two of Australia's four biggest banks – ANZ and Westpac – have historically run CSC Hogan. I don't know what they are doing…

>westpac (Not so) fun fact, Westpacs account password policy requires the following: 6 characters. Not minimum. 6 exactly. (!!!) Includes at least 1 number and one letter No special characters, spaces or repeating characters And it’s case insensitive! Very convenient indeed if your caps lock is broken or something

6 characters sounds like crypt(). Pretty common on old Unix.

Edit: I stand corrected, that's 8 characters.

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