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Comment by michaelmcdonald | Hacker News Reader

For a brief stint I worked at an insurance company that had a training program for COBOL. They would hire individuals that had zero programming experience but showed an aptitude for critical / logical thinking. Over a period of 8-10 weeks they would introduce basic programming concepts, move the students into Assembly, then to COBOL.

Their reasoning was it would be easier to train new individuals and work them up, using senior staff as trainers and escalation points than to try and find existing COBOL programmers. They started the pay off quite well and were able to pull in some highly talented people. They approached it almost like an apprenticeship, only with programming as the trade.

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I actually went through something like this back in 1996. A few local companies (AFLAC, TSYS and Blue Cross/Blue Shield) sponsored a program that taught Assembler, COBOL, IMS, DB2, JCL, Rexx, etc. Those who made it through all the testing, interviews, background checks, etc. were paid to go to school 8 hours a day for 3 months. When you were done you were guaranteed a job at one of those companies, and you agreed to work there a minimum of 4 years to work off the money that was paid to you while you went through training. If you left the company before the time was up you had to pay back the remaining balance. This put all of us into working on mainframes during Y2K. Once Y2K was done I moved on to Java, then .NET, and now work in Machine Learning, 24 years later. It was a great way to get my foot in the door.

If you bring in most people with previous programming or systems exposure, they hear "COBOL", and make jokes about "COOL COBOL" (COBOL Object Orientated Language). This somewhat includes myself.

If you bring in someone who is smart, pragmatic, and interested in a nice indoor job with good pay, they're more interested in the specialized job training and position that comes with it.

Someone I knew made the tongue in cheek retirement joke that "where else could I learn COBOL and mainframe in university, and never learn anything else until I retired?"

These two extremes I can't understand: people who never want to learn anything and people who seem to only want to use each framework once.

The problem is finding the middle ground. There's only so much I can learn, and only so much time to learn it. I don't want to spend my time spinning my wheels learning $NEXT_BIG_THING only for it to be superseded by $NEXT_BIG_THING+1 by the time I master it.

I think both are an example of an aversion to deep learning.

My personal theory is it's some mix of imposter syndrome and fear of missing out. If you don't keep up with the latest tech then sooner or later you'll be found out and ejected from the pack, never to draw another sv paycheck again.

COOL (for C Object Oriented Language) was the internal Microsoft name for what would become C#.

The jokes I heard were about ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL, following the convention established by C++.

Recent versions of the COBOL standard, like Fortran and Ada, include object-oriented extensions.

> and make jokes about "COOL COBOL" (COBOL Object Orientated Language)

I always assumed it'd be `POST-INCREMENT COBOL BY 1`

ADD 1 TO COBOL

But does that expression evaluate to the incremented value?

You have a responsibility to yourself to keep your knowledge current and up to day so that you can thrive in the job market.

If your skill is in demand, get training in that domain.

If your skill belongs to a niche, be careful, consider how you can reuse the knowledge you are aquiring.

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