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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

#11

Post by nubinetwork »

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…

Maybe not COBOL, but I know someone who works for a payment processor / print shop in the New England area, they use a language called PL/B which is pretty close. Most of the senior crew are all retired now, and the place is practically falling apart.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#12

Post by msh »

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…

I have worked for (or as a consultant) for several big european (retail) banks. They have all had a big cobol code base.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#13

Post by msh »

I dont know cobol/mainframes but have worked for several banks that uses it heavily and that would love to train developers in the tech. They have never been able to convince me or any of my colleagues go that way.

I have never seen a good reason that I as a developer should shift to a proprietary technology with very small sector usage, very little long term future and no personal interest.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#14

Post by inSenCite »

I've worked in the bowels of both banking (business, retail, securities, wealth) and healthcare (PBM) for the last 10ish years.

This is less endemic on the securities and wealth side. Business and retail banking back-end transactions and processing have extremely large COBOL/mainframe dependencies. The systems have been built over decades. Some of these banks have tried to transition to newer tech and progress is very slow + bumpy. I'm not a cobol dev but from what I understand it is spaghetti'd to hell and back.

There is def a labor shortage but more of the younger gen is being exposed to this tech via the transition/transformation projects. But def. a dying breed from what I've experienced.

note: except for the healthcare side, all this experience is OUTSIDE the US

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#15

Post by nubinetwork »

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.

Maybe not an ancient IBM mainframe, but I've used older HPPA systems, AS/400 systems, and DEC Alpha systems as well - in a hospital setting... thankfully they were all phased out in the 2005-2010 range.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#16

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

You can emulate the mainframes these applications were built for on your smartphone. It’s all completely and utterly obsolete.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#17

Post by the_third_wave »

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.

While having mainframe hardware at home is rather impractical not to mention costly there is an alternative which can be run on limited hardware:

Hercules is an open source software implementation of the mainframe System/370 and ESA/390 architectures, in addition to the new 64-bit z/Architecture. Hercules runs under Linux, Windows (98, NT, 2000, and XP), Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (10.3 and later).

http://www.hercules-390.org/

I tinkered with this a bit some 25 years ago, running it on Linux on an Abit BP-6 (dual 400 MHz Celerons overclocked to 466 MHz, just imagine the power...) [1], just for fun really. It booted and I managed to run some simple tools on it so it should do more on up to date hardware.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/343/5

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#18

Post by mschild »

There is a network of local state owned savings banks in Germany called Sparkasse.

They have an in-house IT company called Finanz Informatik. I was surprised to learn that they actually had IT/Software Dev apprenticeships that taught COBOL and mainframes as their main subject. Apparently the program was somewhat successful for them.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#19

Post by bushbaba »

tinus_hn wrote: post #16
jve wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can emulate the mainframes these applications were built for on your smartphone. It’s all completely and utterly obsolete.

Agreed. Mainframes made sense prior to distributed computing being a well used “thing”. Back in an era where a single consumer grade computer wouldn’t handle a sizeable chunk of workload, and there needing to be a single log of account balances, inventory etc.

Today a single computer is so powerful it can easily take on the needs of a logical division of work. Hence distributed computing taking over the world.

Your modern smartphone is more powerful than mainframes of generation prior.

Re: Shortage of COBOL developers in insurance and banks

#20

Post by skissane »

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 as of today, but according to media reports ANZ was still using it in 2016 [0] and Westpac in 2019 [1]. Hogan is based on z/OS, CICS, COBOL. Not only is the vendor-supplied product code in COBOL, any customer ends up having to write lots of their own COBOL code to add customisations necessary for their environment. CSC – now DXC – has a replacement platform, Celiriti, which runs on a more mainstream tech stack (Java/Linux/etc), and I believe both were looking at migrating to that eventually. Australia's 6th largest bank, Suncorp, uses Hogan too, having in 2020 abandoned an attempt to replace it with Oracle Banking Platform. [3]

[0] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/core-banking-overhaul-still-o...

[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/westpacs-100m-core-network-re...

[2] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorp-to-modernise-its-hoga...

[3] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorps-oracle-core-finally-...

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