7 ms·
It's not unheard of. But you must understand that these are people that have a pretty decent job security in an often huge codebase that has been aquiring cruft
by Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
It's not unheard of. But you must understand that these are people that have a pretty decent job security in an often huge codebase that has been aquiring cruft for 30 years in language most people don't understand. I would like to be able to claim that the code is good, but some of the people writing it in the first place were not programmers. It is not strictly bad, but some parts are just mine fields.
A bit related:
I spent 2 years of my life on a C codebase written by mathematicians that would much rather have written it in APL. I don't know if you have seen C written as APL, but that is 2 years of my life I will never get back. I left for a lesser paid, more fun job. Upon leaving the manager offered me a 60% pay raise (yup, I should have had higher demands, but at least I proved myself :) ).
Unless you enjoy torturing yourself, legacy COBOL programming is not very rewaeding, and at least in Sweden, most of it is slowly being moved to other languages.
- UweSchmidt 10y agoBest story I've heard is one of the old programmers commenting his COBOL code in latin. It was a different time...
- endgame 10y agoMalus est?
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoI feel like that's a play for job security more than anything else.
- eru 10y agoAnd different times: these days with Google Translate Latin doesn't add much to your job security.
- bad_login 10y agoIt's common practice in Vatican Bank.
- dghughes 10y ago"Mea culpa" over and over?
- int_19h 10y ago> COBOL programming is not very rewaeding, and at least in Sweden, most of it is slowly being moved to other languages. Which would imply that there's a demand for people who know both COBOL, and whatever's the popular migration target for such systems these days (I assume Java?).
- viraptor 10y agoMigration target like visual cobol (not a joke). Just look at those smiling hipsters writing cobol.net on their laptop. https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/visual-cobol-for-visual-studio/ https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/visual-cobo...
- CyberDildonics 10y agoI can't wait until I can compile Cobol for webasm
- nickpsecurity 10y agoNah, go with terminal apps in Visual COBOL distributed as Electron apps.
- WorldMaker 10y agohttps://xtermjs.org/ https://xtermjs.org/ is here for you.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoOh my goodness... why do I keep making jokes about how a ridiculous world would function and then reality is already halfway there?! It's been happening too often past two years.