New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
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Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#2Don't shoot! Let them burn!
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#3Unemployment putting people to work.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#4How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#5[deleted]
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#6How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help
I imagine it's pretty difficult. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but from my understanding you not only have to understand the COBOL languages, but various mainframe environment parts like the OS, APIs, databases, etc.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#7Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#8How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help
I imagine it's pretty difficult. I'm not a mainframe programmer, but from my understanding you not only have to understand the COBOL languages, but various mainframe environment parts like the OS, APIs, databases, etc.
I did mainframe COBOL for a few years in the 90’s (Y2K fixes). It’s actually not that difficult - I could probably bring a Java developer up to speed on it in less than a month. COBOL is actually extremely easy to program in, but it’s also limited in its expressiveness, so you end up repeating yourself a lot, which leads to complex debugging sessions.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#9How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help
The thing about old COBOL systems is, the language isn't the problem. Snark aside, it isn't that bad.
The major issue is the code written in it. Remember, a lot of COBOL code comes from a time before a lot of programming best practices were discovered. Structured programming-- as in, actually having function calls instead of just GOTO statements everywhere-- was a novel hoity-toity concept when COBOL first existed. Relational databases? Forget about it, they won't exist for another decade and a half. You get flat files; if you're lucky there might be field separators, if you're unlucky you'll have to find the column widths in the code somewhere. And don't even think that any of it is documented.
That's the sort of thing you're taking on when you jump into a legacy COBOL system.
Re: New Jersey needs COBOL programmers for their unemployment claims system
#10How hard is cobol to pick up and learn at the level needed to contribute? I'm sure there are many no longer employed programmers in the tri state area that might be able to help
depends on the codebase, some people showed me long lasting, semi patched, semi generated code and it was not pretty
the language in itself is archaic but there's nothing difficult in it