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Comment by brtkdotse | Hacker News Reader

Banks in Sweden are making a big effort of recruiting, training and offering a viable career path for COBOL developers. A bunch of central systems still run like clockwork on IBM mainframes, why replace them?

https://sebgroup.com/career/who-are-you/graduates-and-studen...

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I keep hearing about these magical systems that work like clockwork, but I also work in a bank and the reality is very different. In a void, yes, those systems are amazing. Now add all the other systems that have to be linked with that and things start to turn into a nightmarish situation. All the new systems have to be contorted, twisted and designed in weird ways to accommodate the old ones. Everything works a bit worse just because there are a minority of systems that don't know UTF-8 for example, or can't send more than 16 bytes in a field. Banks are very bad at IT. If you don't work in the trading part of it you are seen as a necessary evil. These systems are still with us because banks are very risk averse and because decommissioning a system in a bank can take decades.

If you think banks old software is bad, just wait till you see their newer stuff. The JSP I see dumped out there is just terrifying in many cases... and that's after security and code review.

Tangential but sort of closely related...

15 years ago we needed to do crazy amounts of manual testing of an early mobile app on lots of different devices (we had ~2k separate device models in the office).

Our best hire ever in this area was this ~55-60 yo woman who had a background as a bank teller and had been selected to receive COBOL training by the Swedish bank who had employed her since she was young - they had done aptitude tests and recruited primarily from their existing work force.

She had the perfect combination of drive, curiosity and ability to express herself clearly and logically. She ended up working really closely and efficently with a bunch of developers in their 20s. She also helped so much in building a really nice, "wholesome" atmosphere in the office.

Any idea what it's like from a physical perspective to keep a mainframe like that running? Is there a point at which parts need to be custom made to replace anything that breaks or do they generally keep running with minimal physical issues?

Kinda makes me think about those old industrial engines that have been running continuously for 80-100 years.

You can buy new, fresh, 100% compatible mainframe hardware from the same companies where you bought them 30 years ago, that's not an issue. They're not cheap but they never were anyway.

They should just move to something more modern.

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