Ask HN: Can you pick up COBOL and get a job doing it
Because I thought the jobs were more about the Mainframe tech behind it (CICS, JCL, etc...)
Sp how can any developer wanting to make those big $$$ but lacking a mainframe get into COBOL?
Sp how can any developer wanting to make those big $$$ but lacking a mainframe get into COBOL?
It's one thing to learn COBOL as a hobby, but as someone who has been inside a COBOL shop (actually, the language was DB/C - which is a variant of COBOL, but close enough), and implemented a (very, very simple) web server in it (and during a "training" period at this company - I also made a breakout clone - let's just say it is possible, but barely playable) - you might not want to do this full time.
Seriously - some of the stuff I saw (and this was over a decade ago) made you want to scream. Maybe things have changed somewhat (I will give the company I worked for credit in one area: GO TO was verboten in all but one situation, which had to do with error trapping logic), but you'll still have to deal with all that old code (some of which may be older than you are!). There's a reason no one wants to touch it, and why not much "new blood" is looking to get involved with it.
That said, newer versions/variants of COBOL have added OOP features and whatnot, plus there are a few other fun areas (DB/C actually had a Java-based VM for it when I last worked at that company, which allowed for some interesting things to be done - one of which was a SQL-like ODBC bridge to the flat-file "database", so you could query it).
I'm not sure whether you'd be able to make big $$$ as a newbie, though. That money typically (I would expect) is reserved for old guys who did it for years, and are fixing critical areas on-demand in a consulting/contract gig.
I gave the idea of doing COBOL back then about 30 seconds of thought, and decided it wasn't worth the pain or potential pigeonholing. Between COBOL and EDI - I'm not sure which is worse (and a combo between them - ugh, shudder).