Hacker News Reader

Comment by yen223 | Hacker News Reader

Risk management.

Assuming the PHB can hire 10 junior devs or 1 senior dev at the same cost:

If you have 10 junior devs and 1 decides to quit, the PHB can swap him out fairly easily - he just has to wait for graduation day.

If you have 1 senior dev and he decides to quit, the PHB's hands are severely tied, especially if the company is located in a place where talent is lacking.

This is also the reason why mainstream languages will likely remain popular forever in the enterprise world - no one wants to take a chance on a language that only 5% of devs know.

View on HN

> This is also the reason why mainstream languages will likely remain popular forever in the enterprise world - no one wants to take a chance on a language that only 5% of devs know.

Unless they have a legacy system. Or what percentage of developers know Cobol these days?

They're not taking a chance on a language only 5% of devs know, precisely because they know how painful it is to be chained to a legacy system. So they do every new project in the industry standard language, which is Java.

Problem is, the industry standard used to be COBOL. Sooner or later, if/when Java falls out of vogue and stops evolving, they will end up with two legacy systems instead of just one.

I can't find the link right now, but I saw an ad from a technical school here in Sweden only a couple of weeks ago advertising their new 1 year Cobol developer program.

I'm not surprised. Over here in Malaysia, almost all banks still run a COBOL backend.

Yea I remember the ad listing a number of large Swedish banks and insurance companies that still use COBOL as an argument for why you should learn COBOL and why it would be easy to get a job afterwards.

This is a good point, but it serves to point out what others are not bringing up. The truth is, managers know programmers aren't cogs and can never be. How could they not? The issue is that their managers believe or really want to believe that programmers are cogs, so the lower manager can cut all experienced programmers and replace them with the cheapest labor they can find. What shows up in the short term is a cost savings, and therefor probably a promotion. Yes, since these new programmers don't know the system it's destined for failure, but who cares? By the time that happens the PHB will be in a new position and no longer responsible for this mess they made.

The true plague or our industry and everyone else's is short term thinking, and I don't see how it could be fixed at this point.

You've just proven the point. Commit to the popular language because finding maintainers in X years will be that much easier

Reply on news.ycombinator.com