31–40 of 309 posts
COBOL was one of the few languages I was introduced to in college back in 90s along with C, BASIC and FORTRAN. Even back then people used to say that COBOL is a dying language.
But.
A quick skim of the postings is finding that what they're really screaming for is somebody who's been familiar with their particular pile of toxic waste for at least four years at minimum. They're asking for people with 4+ years of COBOL, and JCL (ok, fine), and DB2, and VSAM, and "SDLC" (proto-waterfall), and, oh yeah, a four-year degree.
Heck, there's a posting asking for somebody to draw diagrams and document their existing processes, and for that they expect you to have 10 years of COBOL experience.
Okay then. This is not yet a mess that they're motivated enough to fix.
Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.
I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private b…
I used to work on mainframe COBOL during the Y2K times. While the language is easy to pick up and the OS specific things are not too hard, the style of programming can lead to issues. Typically, shared data structures are often stored in separate files called copybooks and they can be hard to track down. Most of the code is not in any source control repositories which means no one knows which is the actual deployed v…
That's not an issue with "style of programming", it's just complete disregard of software engineering basics.
What's obvious in 2020 was cutting-edge and forward-thinking in 1960. The rude kids of 2080 may sneer at your best code circa 2020.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not an issue with "style of programming", it's just complete disregard of software engineering basics.
Easy there. We're standing on the shoulders of those COBOL giants. What's obvious in 2020 was cutting-edge and forward-thinking in 1960. The rude kids of 2080 may sneer at your best code circa 2020.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programming a net new isolated Cobol may not be difficult for experienced programmer. Difficulty (and/or downright hate, for many;) lies in 1. Ecosystem - obscure libraries rules and os that don't jive with posix-like mindset 2. Legacy code - having to dig into a ginormous monolithic program and figure out what some obscure pieces of code do, untouched and undocumented by anybody in your team, with ridiculous interde…
Is there any way to learn the ecosystem? Last time I looked, you couldn’t just spin up z/OS in VMware and start hacking, which made it hard for me to figure out how I’d actually learn.
open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64
COBOL compiler
Yet I’m sure they’re offering $60K/year.
I whole heartedly agree. The problem with government tech positions is they are not even competitive. Instead of hiring three mediocre or less than mediocre engineers at $60k, why not hire an amazing $150k - $180k engineer? I’m pretty sure they have ceilings on positions just so people don’t get outraged at government salaries, but incidents and times like these prove government needs to be competitive with private b…
COBOL was one of the few languages I was introduced to in college back in 90s along with C, BASIC and FORTRAN. Even back then people used to say that COBOL is a dying language.