101–110 of 309 posts
Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.
A little better than that, though not Google salaries. Skimming through some open NJ civil service jobs, I'm seeing advertised ranges like $60k-$105k for tech jobs [1] [2]. The pensions are also a lot more generous than most private-sector ones. [1] https://info.csc.state.nj.us/Vats/WebAnno.aspx?FileNumber=30... [2] https://info.csc.state.nj.us/Vats/WebAnno.aspx?FileNumber=30...
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The difference you're missing is we're still relying on COBOL, but we aren't relying on grandparents to make the butter and bread we eat lest we starve.
Not ideal, but it's not like it couldn't be migrated to another language and COBOL docs are readily available to at least understand the language. We would find a way.
If you can data warehouse aspects off, that's great and can slowly bite away, migrate chunks bit by bit. Though one of the last will often be the database itself. Report generation is often an area that will hit resources hard and can also be easiest to migrate away towards something better using a system that periodically syncs the database onto another platform with all the latest do it yourself easy accessible tools. That allows those wanting the reports to be able to make and change that themselves removing a lot of code development and main system overhead.
With that, knowing the language is not even half the battle, the business knowledge would be the lion's share and to integrate the two skills effectively, that's where the money is.
You could have a payroll system, migrate line by line, logic by logic from COBOL to C. Yet the way the data is handled, the nuances of the way the languages round numbers, store data, formats, handle exceptions or early termination. It's not just a case of setting the right flags in the compiler and job done.
But yes, there is always a way. As always, the devil is in the detail.
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Or they, like many non-technical organizations, have no idea how to hire programmers. Could be worth a shot; even at regular companies they often over-state resume requirements.
As someone who works with a lot of state IT people, if they don't know how to hire programmers, they probably don't know how to manage programmers. In a bureaucracy, if the administrators are making these kinds of unrealistic hiring demands in a crisis, it probably means that the administrators outrank all programmers and don't trust them to make their own decisions. This is not an environment to work in.
I was sort of tempted to pursue this. I did a few years in the salty COBOL mines back when I was a PFY about 20...plus years ago. This niche probably hasn't moved very much since then and I could probably recall most of it after a few hours. I'm freelancing right now anyway and some other projects just vaporized. But. A quick skim of the postings is finding that what they're really screaming for is somebody who's bee…
I can tick the 10+ years COBOL box nicely, though that was 30+ years ago and with that, somebody with 1-3 years COBOL would be more effective than somebody as myself. Still, in an era of movie superheroes, who knew that having 10+ years upon your CV would enable you to go, step aside good citizens, for I shall save you. COBOL man to the rescue.
If you see any bosses with a weird scarf, back away cause they may spit corona-acid in your face!
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There's a claim in one of the reply threads that they contracted HP to build a replacement years ago, but the project didn't succeed: https://twitter.com/tradel/status/1246526465207869440
This feels like government thinking around infrastructure or military hardware where you open up bids and accept the lowest offer. While there are problems with lowest-bidder-win, the real issue here is that systems like this are more living and breathing than one-off; you need a teams that tend to them, not bringing in a contractor.
It is, but you can't have any joe schmoe off the street coming in and learn how to pour concrete in a day. This is something that requires practice and problem solving skills. And years of it.
How 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. R…