Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
1–10 of 72 posts
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#2As 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.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#3As 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.
I'd also say it's the compensation. I love Python, I love being a software architect helping smart engineers build good software, but I also love mainframes and, if the money is good, why not?
Last time I checked, the money wasn't good.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#4As 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.
I'd also say it's the compensation. I love Python, I love being a software architect helping smart engineers build good software, but I also love mainframes and, if the money is good, why not? Last time I checked, the money wasn't good.
Presumably the money isn't good for a reason, i.e. there are actually enough people to get them by.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#5As 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.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd also say it's the compensation. I love Python, I love being a software architect helping smart engineers build good software, but I also love mainframes and, if the money is good, why not? Last time I checked, the money wasn't good.
Presumably the money isn't good for a reason, i.e. there are actually enough people to get them by.
I doubt it. As always, "shortage" is just a euphemism for "we don't want to pay market rate".
It's a small enough niche that buyers of services can conspire.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#7The 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 wealth. I’ve seen plenty of company-specific languages, plenty of C++, Java, perl, python but have literally never encountered a COBOL system. There’s one system at one of the banks that I was a contractor at which may have been COBOL I’m not sure. I didn’t work directly on it and it ran on a Tandem.
I’ve never worked for a pure retail bank so it’s possible that some pure retail banks use COBOL, but I have worked on settlement systems, payment systems, reconciliation systems etc including for banks that have a retail arm as part of a larger bank and haven’t seen hide nor hair of COBOL anywhere. Some cynical part of me wonders whether IBM PR or some niche trade body or recruitment agency seeds these stories into the press every now and again to get people to fixate on COBOL and these clunky mainframes being somehow essential to the financial system.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#8The 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…
A friend of mine worked for a bank, or rather part of a bank that did the payroll I think. And they where working on converting all the COBOL to java a few years back.
From personal experience when I got a loan approved I noticed the bank dude had to log into a terminal based system via remote login to a VM. But I can't say for certain that it was written in COBOL. But certainly written around or before the 90s.
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#9As 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.
Not that I have any experience of it in practice, but shouldn't those whole machines be possible to emulate gracefully by now? If not in software alone, at least combined with e.g. a decent FPGA.
Of course that's of limited benefit if the jobs also include service of the actual hardware, but it seems like it should be good enough to get experience with the machines as an environment for programming. (And certainly compact enough to have at your house)
Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks
#10As 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.
Largely legacy I'd say
- Most new stuff is built on regular servers with Linux running
- Mainframe kind of stuff would be HPC (high performing computing), this is where huge calculation are done at scale, this would be scientific/university/engineering use cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
> most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.