Cutting-edge IT firms need experts in 'dead' languages
thescotsman.scotsman.com
thescotsman.scotsman.com
It's used by a good couple hundred municipalities in Brazil to balance their books and help adhere to their required accounting practices.
It doesn't bother too much that we pay the consultant a lot to customize it, because it seems like hell.
They also need to realize that sometimes it really is cheaper/better to start from scratch than to try to prop up a dying system.
Complaining about the cost of programmers while refusing to do a rewrite is pointless. You've picked your path.
Edit: And if they do re-write it, they'll use C++ code written like C code. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but just know that they "think different" and you have to adapt to their way, not them to yours.
The bigger issue is that the application you need to fix is mission critical, undocumented and contains massive amounts of spaghetti code. There usually aren't any tests, source control might not be used and it's far from certain there are automated builds or deploy scripts.
In some cases you might not even have source or the tools to use it, and then you have much bigger problems. But the language usually isn't the main problem.
You may be right in your second to paragraphs, however. All of this mainframe stuff was designed when machines were vastly more expensive than the programmers tending to them. In any modern context, the computers that make us productive cost on the order of magnitude of a chair, not a building.
When you ask HR to run an advertisment like this they don't have any idea what they are asking, they hear "computer consultant for this program" and look in their book of "What do we normally pay consultants?" Oh yes, here it is $30/hr, put that in there. So when you contact them and tell them $500/hr they will initially tell you "No thanks."
Then they will tell the person who asked them to write the ad that some "Kook" said they would do it but for $500/hr and the manager will say "Did you get their number? Are they local?" and the HR person will fall off their chair, then pick them selves up and sheepishly call you back :-)
So this story isn't that plausible.
Ok, so maybe there are fewer jobs but harder to fill? Well, when you look at Cobol roles across the whole of the UK they are paying below equivalent java developer rates.
So yeah, not worth learning Cobol just yet.
"While our universities are turning out very able graduates, well versed in the sexy new languages of Java, .Net and the like..."
I chuckled.
I think the market will take care of this, rather than universities. It is simple supply and demand. If COBOL programmers get paid enough of a premium, people will learn COBOL. This is an order of magnitude more likely than finding professors to teach a language they dislike. Even 20 years ago few students were lining up for university COBOL courses.
I've never understood why it is always presented as a bad thing for free market economics to apply to hiring people to do shitty jobs.
It seems obvious, in a programmer shortage, that nobody good is going to go work for this cutting-edge(!?) IT company.
Pay me £600K a year and I'd even wear a suit and tie.
Actually, I suspect that I'd probably start writing something to convert COBOL to/from s-expressions and automate any changes to be made.
Maybe by marketing it right - you're a C2D (COBOL to Die) conversion consultant, ready to do the heavy lifting to modernize their obsolete codebase...
Whereas if you had a COBOL parse tree as an s-expression it might be much easier to write "smart" code to do the changes and then write out the results back to COBOL.
While our universities are turning out very
able graduates, well versed in the sexy new
languages of Java, .Net and the like...
Given that many banks are reporting record profits, I'm not sure I buy the 'it costs too much' argument.
There are also enormous business risks associated with a transfer from one system to another
Yes, there are risks, but there are also large business risks in finding out that there's no one left who can keep your systems running either. Or, there's only 2, and each person charges $2k/hour (remember, you can't switch because it costs too much!).
What??? UK banks, including RBS which is the biggest in Scotland - the source of this report - are having a disastrous time. They're still reeling from the 2008 meltdown, are facing huge costs re mis-selling of PPI and to cap it all are now suffering from the Eurozone crisis. Their share prices are collapsing and they're sacking 10s of 1000s of people. They do not have money for massive capital infrastructure investment.
It's all very well to wring your hands and demand investment in an area that you think is worthwhile, but that profit has got to feed a lot of mouths. Relatively speaking the profits are NOT that big. Perhaps bank leaders _are_ being short-sighted about this, but it's a whole lot more complex than bankers filling their pockets to get rich in the short term.
And from personal experience I can assure you one thing: they will invest wherever they think they'll get the best return. Perhaps that isn't aging IT systems.
I have been flirting recently with a return home to Scotland (from Berlin) recently, and have found it extremely difficult to find any interesting opportunities on par with what I'm doing right now. The quote above reminds me why I had to leave to stay sane.
The author has a very strange notion of sexiness. Or a very strange sense of humor.
That 60's design is a killer.
Saying "assembler" is a language is like saying that "Romantic" is a language. Are you talking about PDP-8, x86, ARM, MIPS, SPARC, ... ? Also, having spent the previous night doing nothing but writing assembly (to patch machine code, no less), I suddenly feel very old.
[edit]Or seanstickle could be right. COBOL was invented before my mother was even born, so this isn't exactly my area of expertise. ;)
Turns out my brother-in-law is well versed in all the languages, as he works on a key cross-platform IBM product. He also is a whiz with reading core dumps.
Not saying any intention is that sinister, but the general CS job market is a different market than administering legacy systems mostly. These guys will be able to sit on that job for years.
That can be very difficult, depending on the target language and the Cobol.
More important, the output of said compiler may not be any more maintainable than the Cobol. (Even an accurate translation of assembly language to C can reduce maintainability.)
These people DO NOT WANT PROGRAMMERS, they want tools that help them do their job. So they see programmers like the masons who laid the brickwork of their headquarters, indespensible when it was built, but never to be seen again. So they build their business logic 'tool' and they run it, for ever, and ever, and ever. Sometimes on really cool old hardware like DECSystem 10's or PR1ME machines.
After you have your legacy Cobol code running in a modern environment and the frontend can interface with it, you can start gutting it piece by piece to get rid of the legacy codebase.
I fear that in 50 years, there will be a tremendous need for programmers that can deal with a horrible 1990's language called Java and fucked up non-paradigm called object oriented programming.
I also see this as a problem with the companies who still want to maintain code from decades ago. It will become more expensive day by day. Of course, to a banker, computer programming and it maintenance is nothing but a cost. However, at some point it will become more affordable in the long term to just scrap the old legacy systems.