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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Is there an estimate on how many COBOL jobs are out there still? And are there still apprenticeship/training programs for learning COBOL?

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Just wanted to say I wrote a whole fermi estimate reply for the amount of jobs in the world until I realized you meant as in getting paid for work and not as in JCL files you can submit to run cobol programs.

i know a system that runs cobol.

but there are like 4 or 5 other systems on top of it, some of them use XML, some html, some asp, some java, some vba, some c#.

i dont really understand the concept of a "x language job". like jobs tend to need people to learn systems and domain language, and be problem solvers, and communicators, coordinators, testers, the actual computer language is kind of irrelevant. like i cannot fathom there is a job out there where someone just hacks cobol all day and thats all they do.

That's my experience. I've actually been around systems that use Cobol amongst other things for 20 years (only did tiniest bit myself) but the developers tend to be experts in business as well - like, this set of Cobol programs are for payroll, and the developers understand payroll processing. They can discuss legislative nuances and taxation and benefits and deductions with functional analysts.

Basically, all Cobol I've ever seen is firmly performing a business / functional task. I guess it's in the name :-)

The problem is that the "cobol language job" is really a mainframe job which means an operating system that is from a completely alien parallell reality that diverged from the rest of the timeline 60 years ago. So it's not a cobol job, it's a relearn computing from the ground up again job. I'm exaggerating but it's a complete nervous system shock until one acclimates to the zOS paradigm.

Do you speak from experience?

Honestly, I find the whole mainframe world fascinating. Would love to learn more.

Yes I maintain two systems on the mainframe been doing it for 8 months feel free to ask questions

Apparently, an "x language job" was a well-known concept from the "before times." ;-)

I'll always vividly remember this article from the days when I began to become entranced with IT Tech stuff... http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9712.htm

I was getting into Linux around then too so I devoured Litt's site. Shortly after I read this my cobol-programming neighbor (worked for CapOne) was laid off. As far as I know he never returned to Cobol programming (unless he managed to snag something during covid).

I’d like to know these places you speak of because every single time I’ve applied for a job in the past ~15 years where I didn’t have explicit experience in the specific programming language that was specified, I failed to get the job. A lot of those that I applied for I had significant domain knowledge as well. In fact I can’t even think of a time I got further than an introductory phone call.

But that is because HR people and recruiters generally don’t know anything about anything tech. They cannot filter resumes on anything vague, so programming language is an easy one. But gp is right; once you are in, the language is mostly irrelevant, unless the company is small and/or their business is selling or maintaining actual tech products.

No idea how many jobs. Places that use it extensively usually have apprenticeships and/or training. $DAYJOB does (big financial firm). There are even some mainframe/COBOL college programs.

I always find it amusing that the least sexy of languages runs on the sexiest systems.

A modern mainframe is a thing to behold.

Do you mind expanding a bit?

https://www.thegreengrid.org/ja/newsroom/blog/making-ibm-mag...

https://www.ibm.com/z

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer

They lost a bit of their glam when moved from 24" racks to 19" ones so that the datacenter people could hide these beauties in warehouse sized facilities instead of being proudly displayed at corporate headquarters ;-)

tianhe-1, cerebras, the ga144, and the ambiq apollo4 do not generally run cobol

Meh. None of those has the weird multi-gigabyte L4 caches of a Telum. And none of them will continue working during an earthquake.

whatchoo talkin bout willis

the cerebras wse-2 has 40 gigabytes of on-chip sram, pretty sure tianhe-1 has a few gigabytes of l2 cache, and it's common nowadays for even laptops and cellphones to have weird multi-gigabyte memories as the level in the memory hierarchy below l3 cache or even l2 cache; they just don't call it cache, and they use nonvolatile memory for the level below that

also, of the machines i listed, only tianhe-1 will have any particular trouble with earthquakes

Tianhe-1 is a lot of Xeons, Nvidias, and some SPARC-like CPUs. It's not a single image machine with a gigantic shared pool of memory, but a cluster of 7000-ish nodes with very fast interconnects, managed with SLURM. In that sense, these supercomputers are somewhat boring - they are a very large cluster of relatively mundane machines. In that regard, an ARM Mac is more interesting because CPUs and GPUs share memory and you don't need to copy it over a PCIe bus.

Cerebras is a tour de force, but it's far from a general purpose computer. What it does, it does well, but you won't see it doing transactional workloads.

this is the same kind of error as saying that an arm mac is somewhat boring because it's a large cluster of relatively mundane logic gates and capacitors

you won't see a mainframe running crysis either

Apple's M-series, in particular their humongous reorder buffer, is really cool, but IBM's Telum processor with its revolutionary distributed virtual cache architecture and on-chip inference accelerator (with a latency so low it allows AI-fraud detection during transactions) and 5+ GHz base clock, is on a different league, along with all the other little nice things, such as the multiple smaller computers that allow the CPUs to run user code and as little as possible of everything else.

They are, of course, built for different uses.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mainframe-ibm-z16-telum

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16924/did-ibm-just-preview-th...

Any normal PC or server will continue working during an earthquake. Source: working as a sysadmin/programmer/jack-of-all-trades in Japan for almost 5 years, I have seen many earthquakes, but never a PC or server crashing because of it. Oh, and my workplace has a supercomputer, it also survives earthquakes just fine.

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