4 ms·

> billions more being written each year for maintenance and new features This is funny to me, because the where I'm working right now, they have teams building

> billions more being written each year for maintenance and new features This is funny to me, because the where I'm working right now, they have teams building entirely new projects in COBOL. The reason is that it's a company with a very high average age and incredible secondary benefits for baby boomers (old contracts, young people get ripped off), so they have an army of COBOL developers while there's a shortage for pretty much every other type of dev.

oblio 8y ago
Yeah, but what will they do in 10-15 years? Those people aren’t immortal and newcomers will have to be: * persuaded to come: tough sell for Cobol * 99% internally trained cause the pool of Cobol devs is probably similar to that of Elm devs :)
- dmitrygr 8y ago
  This problem is solvable by basic market dynamics. When everyone knows that a JavaScript "Dev" can make $80k and a cobol one can make $190k, people with learn cobol. It isn't hard. If you can grasp one imperative language, you can grasp any of them.
  - oblio 8y ago
    True, but if the Cobol market is for 10k developers worldwide, not many people will venture there, even for higher pay. Cause if you get fired from your Cobol job and there’s no openings for Cobol devs, your market value just plummeted to $40k as a Junior Javascript dev ;) And despite what we may think, except for the big tech companies, everyone else doesn’t really hire generalists. You could have 20 years experience as a programmer in 10 different languages, HR still wants a Java programmer with 5 years of Java experience.
    - collyw 8y ago
      Fuck it, I am sick of the churn associated with modern development. Cobol sounds quite appealing right now.
      - kayla210 8y ago
        There's no churn, it's great. And there's plenty to learn once you get in, depending on where you go. COBOL requires knowing a good bit about the business itself, so it's hard to get bored with it. At least, I haven't yet and I've been at it for a whopping 2 years.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        You could also become an embedded dev. Write software for cars or planes, or train, or nuclear power plants. If you want you can work on the same piece of software using the same tooling for your whole career.
        collyw 8y ago
        Whats the language of choice for that? C or would Rust be worth learning? Any pointers for how to get started in that field?
        murph-almighty 8y ago
        (heh pointers) I was in ECE in college (graduated in 2017) but do full stack software engineering for a bank now. AFAIK it's still C, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rust picked up due to the emphasis on memory safety- dynamic memory allocation and recursion are usually avoided in embedded. Some of the lessons I got from embedded have carried over to my place of work- I found a repo that used floating point for money and immediately knew why that was a bad idea, because my embedded systems professor had spent an almost an entire lesson explaining why you don't use floating point for money or time. side note: Said professor (Phil Koopman) was an expert witness in the Toyota unexpected acceleration lawsuit, he has a talk on it that can be found at https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toyota-unintended.html https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toy....

oblio 8y ago

Yeah, but what will they do in 10-15 years? Those people aren’t immortal and newcomers will have to be: * persuaded to come: tough sell for Cobol * 99% internally trained cause the pool of Cobol devs is probably similar to that of Elm devs :)

dmitrygr 8y ago
This problem is solvable by basic market dynamics. When everyone knows that a JavaScript "Dev" can make $80k and a cobol one can make $190k, people with learn cobol. It isn't hard. If you can grasp one imperative language, you can grasp any of them.
- oblio 8y ago
  True, but if the Cobol market is for 10k developers worldwide, not many people will venture there, even for higher pay. Cause if you get fired from your Cobol job and there’s no openings for Cobol devs, your market value just plummeted to $40k as a Junior Javascript dev ;) And despite what we may think, except for the big tech companies, everyone else doesn’t really hire generalists. You could have 20 years experience as a programmer in 10 different languages, HR still wants a Java programmer with 5 years of Java experience.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Fuck it, I am sick of the churn associated with modern development. Cobol sounds quite appealing right now.
    - kayla210 8y ago
      There's no churn, it's great. And there's plenty to learn once you get in, depending on where you go. COBOL requires knowing a good bit about the business itself, so it's hard to get bored with it. At least, I haven't yet and I've been at it for a whopping 2 years.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      You could also become an embedded dev. Write software for cars or planes, or train, or nuclear power plants. If you want you can work on the same piece of software using the same tooling for your whole career.
      - collyw 8y ago
        Whats the language of choice for that? C or would Rust be worth learning? Any pointers for how to get started in that field?
        murph-almighty 8y ago
        (heh pointers) I was in ECE in college (graduated in 2017) but do full stack software engineering for a bank now. AFAIK it's still C, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rust picked up due to the emphasis on memory safety- dynamic memory allocation and recursion are usually avoided in embedded. Some of the lessons I got from embedded have carried over to my place of work- I found a repo that used floating point for money and immediately knew why that was a bad idea, because my embedded systems professor had spent an almost an entire lesson explaining why you don't use floating point for money or time. side note: Said professor (Phil Koopman) was an expert witness in the Toyota unexpected acceleration lawsuit, he has a talk on it that can be found at https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toyota-unintended.html https://betterembsw.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toy....