61–70 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...
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…
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.
This is all second-hand, etc., but from what I've heard, NJ's IT systems are a mess across the board. The most shocking story was about their system for tracking Medicaid patients. Their system had a fixed-width field for the patient's ID, and they ran out of identifiers - so they just started to recycle them again from the beginning. This problem was multiplied by the fact that, to say money, they didn't have backup…
I was at the top of my pay grade just under architect and only two years out of college making around 68k a year in Olympia. Olympia is not a cheap place to live. On top of that you’re basically legislates NOT to do work.
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…
Do they mean that SDLC? Or do they mean "synchronous data link control"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
apt search cobol found this. open-cobol/bionic 1.1-2 amd64 COBOL compiler Also, I was hoping to find COBOL on learnxinyminutes.com, but didn't :/
When I worked at IBM not TOO long ago there were times when I had to fix a bug in WebSphere that only manifested on z/OS or zLinux and those were hands down the hardest bugs to fix. And that was a relatively modern codebase, by mainframe standards.
The prevalence of COBOL and other older programming languages in many parts of the world's critical infrastructure (unemployment claims here, finance, government, defense) means that the average age of someone maintaining these systems tends older. Older people tend to have more health issues. From the summaries of reports I read about COVID-19, the majority of the deaths happen among the elderly and those with other health conditions.
The idea of civilization collapsing might seem fanciful and farfetched, but the idea struck me after watching a video that was submitted here on HN and the videos it references [0][1][2][3].
[0] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
[1] Preventing the Collapse of Civilization [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19945452
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNmTVThNEY
[3] Eric Cline | 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyry8mgXiTk
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not an issue with "style of programming", it's just complete disregard of software engineering basics.
Did software engineering exist back then.
As for standards you would see from one company to another - early days and lucky to have separate department use same standards. So payroll would have different standards than marketing, but separate ecosystems and less of an issue, beyond team cultural changes and analysts quirks.
But then, standards change over time and become usurped.
So could very well ask the same question in 20 years time as the approach is always changing. May even be a call for C programmers then.
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…
ERROR IN OR NEAR CARD 1 COLUMN 1
0C7 ABEND
ABORT
CORE DUMP FOLLOWS:About the only other thing I remember is:
//SYSIN DD *