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Comment by Deprecate9151 | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a large insurance company with a COBOL core system. I completely agree with this. They paid for people who knew all the undocumented idiosyncrasies and foot-guns in the code. Not just "Knowing COBOL". A decent programmer could read a COBOL program and follow it.

They wouldn't know that the reason the key export fell over when extracting data for your 10K filing because someone had decided/assumed/whatever that a certain record count would never go over 3000, so they hard coded the program to just error out if it went above that value.

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When I was working in a finance company that used cobol, sure I could read cobol. I could probably write some cobol. But the extra crap around cobol, how mainframes work, DB2, JCL, etc. is where this gets complicated.

I just shared this story earlier today with my team. This was Cobol insurance claims processing system, shortly before the Y2K issues.

The claims processing system I worked on used a number system that would only go to 4 digits, it would roll over to 0 if we ever processed more than 9999 claims overnight.

Our VP would not listen to us when we said we needed to change that. He said "Claims process fine every night! There is no problem." I had left before they got to that 10,000th claim (thankfully).

That said, anyone need an old COBOL developer?

Edit: now I’m the VP of Engineering. We do work on tech debt regularly.

Fortran, not COBOL, but I came across a similar thing when helping to update code for Y2K. An insurance company used a 2 digit field for year of birth, assuming that it would always be prefixed with '19'. I sort of forgave them because the code had originally been written in Fortran 2 sometime in the 60s, and who would ever assume that their code might still be in use 40 years later?

In the 1960s, there were still 70 year olds born in the 1890s, and 80 year olds born in the 1880s, so it still doesn't seem like a good decision even for something written back then.

In 1966 a 7.25MB drive cost $25,510.

In todays money that's $246,316.70.

So it would have cost 6 extra cents for every date entry.

I feel like you and the parent are saying a company pays well if you master COBOL as opposed to just "learning" COBOL.

It has nothing to do with mastering COBOL. It has everything to do with mastering the banking systems.

Yeah, that's true of anything related to the finance sector IMHO regardless if it's COBOL or Java or Python.

The language you happen to be using in your system is almost inconsequential in the grans scheme of things, because it's like 1% of everything that's going on and that you need to know.

Training a GPT on all that Cobol could be invaluable at least as a “footgun catcher” for less experienced devs to act as a code reviewer.

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