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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

Cobol expert = $1,000 an hour rate. Great niche, but eventually will get replaced.

Awesome marketing and PR for his company Cobol Cowboys (http://cobolcowboys.com.

> His wife Eileen came up with the name in a reference to "Space Cowboys," a 2000 movie about a group of retired Air Force pilots called in for a trouble-shooting mission in space. The company's slogan? "Not our first rodeo."

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They still teach COBOL and RPG at my old tech school. Went through the class and the tech behind the old mainframes are actually pretty neat. multi CPU processing, dynamically choosing which resources to use, easily transferring work to other machines and how everything works together so tightly. Just a lot of concepts that are getting 'rediscovered' instead of just looking at systems older than me (properly the same feelings that the people who learn lisp go through). They also put us through the normal java/visual basic hazing as well.

Though I ended up in electrical engineering.

A few concepts such as having redundant CPUs introduced a lot of technical challenges without clear pay outs. The previous inspiration was the comparably high cost of computing equipment. Redundancy techniques such as those inspired by the block chain, seem to be much hipper now days.

When I peeked into mainframe development in college, it seemed like a lot of those technically heavy features were implemented because some manager said so, and someone else was willing to pay for it, no matter the practicality (or cost).

If I made $1000/hour, I would only need to do that for like 3 or 4 years before I could retire.

You're not billing out 8 hours a day 52 weeks a year - typically - when billing $1,000/hr :)

That's generally why you charge $1,000/hr to begin with.

What would be the fun in that?

We have 50,000 lines of RPG code we need to replace over the next decade. Since the last RPG dev at our company is over 65 years old and can retire at any moment.

It's going to be funny when we replace it with Java and our business guys ask why it runs much slower.

I never wrote RPG code, but 50k LOC seems a pretty small project to me...

A 50k LOC program serving a critical business function without a test suite or requirements documentation can be quite a chore to replace, especially if you let it go until you have neither staff experienced in the language or with experience with the background of the specific application.

I've converted such programs from one language to another. It is not necessary to understand how the program works, only how the language works.

What you do is function by function, convert the language by duplicating what it does in the new language. Resist any and all urges to fix it, refactor it, improve it, etc. Just translate.

The problem is if there's some obscure language behaviour that's not documented well, and the code relied on that behaviour.

unless you're an expert and knows the language inside out, it's hard to even know such a problem occurred.

True, but languages tend to be far, far better understood and documented than some random application logic.

One semi modern language to another language is one thing. You could probably transpile the damn thing.

Converting batch based, RPG systems to a whole different paradigm, without a test suite covering the edge cases and 0 documentation is another.

> critical business function without a test suite or requirements documentation

Even in the world of standard consumer webapps, this is a real challenge.

It might be small, but I doubt it is. I am really curious what kind of test suite an RPG program would have. If it doesn't have a test suite then good luck because you're basically rewriting a decades old 50K line program and its behavior by guessing how it works. Also who knows what kinds of weird data formats or protocols it deals with that no libraries exist for in other languages.

I just took a look at the language. I can imagine it could be faster than Java since it appears to be so low-level but I couldn't find any benchmarks. Really depends on how good the RPG compiler is when it comes to mapping the language to machine code.

There's a local company where I am that still runs an AS/400. They're hiring a junior dev with 1 year experience in both AS/400 and RPG. Would you recommend taking the job? I imagine it's pretty good job security. On the other hand, you have to program in RPG and Basic all day.

It says 100$/h not 1k. It doesn't seem so great the marketing from a developer POV if it is true that they can normally get 1k/h.

This probably should not matter to me but going to that website (even though its a super basic marketing page) and seeing it without SSL it just starts to bother me that someone who does so much bank consulting would care so little about a simple SSL cert on their own site, especially given how easy Lets Encrypt has made it.

Like I said this probably should not make a difference to me because I won't be hiring any "COBOL Cowboys" anytime soon but as a customer of many large banks who these people have probably worked for its a bit irksome for some reason

Besides the contact form perhaps, what really needs to be SSL? Specific reasons. FYI, the site is powered by Wordpress.

In this age where ISPs are injecting ads and tracking headers? And MitM attacks are used to redirect to malware (see redirects to foxacid)?

Everything needs to be SSL - it provides more than just confidentiality.

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