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Comment by Group_B | Hacker News Reader

It’s honestly not worth your time to learn this for the money.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/g5zvpa/ps...

https://old.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/g5zvpa/ps... - is probably the most succinct from that thread. Your challenge isn't just learning Cobol - that's relatively simple. It's all the surrounding infrastructure that is also very different - different OS, different file system, different database, front-end is 80x24 green and then you get into source control, build and devops which will all be different.

Either side of the millennium my job involved daily use of a terminal interface (on WinNT IIRC) to a green-screen, to me it was just like using pico (which was supersedes by nano) through konsole. But I was just a user, and grew up with monochrome VDUs.

Can you run an AS400 under emulation?? Wouldn't you be developing under a regular IDE with modern tooling [, testing under emulation?] and then transferring to production just like you might with any other system?

On the question of whether it's worth it financially, presumably demand will increase--are people retiring faster than the systems they support or vice versa?

There's also an issue of community/people you'd work with. (Fair or not) there's a strong perception that the current COBOL devs are people that are close to retirement and not exactly eager to take a junior dev under their wing and give the sort of mentorship that one can't get from textbooks and hobby projects. I'm not a COBOL dev or part of the community at all, but I doubt it compares at all to the language-based communities that people around here are more familiar with.

There have been some other recent threads on similar subs from people who actually tried to make the jump to a COBOL role in the past year and the social aspects were brought up again and again, on top of the technical issues ... I can dig a few up if people are at all skeptical.

I know two people who started as COBOL devs, not sure what they're doing right now but they're both in their 40s. They were part of a big bank recruitment in the noughties.

I have found on the occasions I've had to travel to mainframe-world, our COBOL devs (we have many) are very interested in mentoring younger people, and have had some success recruiting them. They understand extremely well that they have a lot to pass on and limited time to do it. I'm sure not all shops are like that (like any insular tech community), but there's probably some selection bias around folks who's response is to run to a sub to complain.

I don't doubt there's some people like this, but if I cut my teeth on mainframes 2-3 decades ago and was nearing retirement, I'm not sure I'd have the patience needed to be a good mentor. (I'm sure I *should*, but as a personal limitation I might not, and I'm probably not alone.)

That's...sad?

We try to cultivate a mentor culture. We have internal mentorship, college internships and organized internal cross-training. You can even do extended cross-training in other teams and try out new jobs (within certain limits). And the fact of the matter is we're terrible at it; should be more organized, easier to access, have more objective outcomes, with even more mentors. I bet an unfortunate fraction of our people don't even know we have formal programs. But very large numbers of folks here want it to work, and keep helping out, keep volunteering. I could pick up the phone right now and probably get a dozen or so greybeards from the mainframe group who would say "sure, I'll show a new kid the ropes".

But you're certainly not an anomaly...there's clearly more people who would say "screw 'em...I got mine" than consider helping someone down the ladder.

I've never worked somewhere in which mentorship was formalized *and* something for which there was a clear relationship to promotion. Not saying that the only way to get me more into it is by paying me or threatening compensation, but when push comes to shove the things that aren't tied to promotions are the first to go (especially in management).

And also, I've noticed my desire to mentor has (slowly) gone down over time. I'm trying to avoid ageism and certainly not assume that seasoned COBOL devs are less eager to mentor than junior devs, and I hope I'm clear in that I'm projecting what is something of a personal limitation onto my future self.

Yes, if the only metric that motivates you is "will this get me more money/promotion", you will certainly look down your nose at people who help others succeed and create fictions like 'no one' in their right mind would do that. My experience has been that there are numerous (though clearly not the majority) people who look at the world differently.

That's not what motivates me, thanks, but it's clearly what motivates the industry

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