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FWIW, a couple of years back I had a gentleman who was a 30 year mainframe programmer in a Rails & Postgres class that I taught. He learned both, was humble eno
by brightball 8y ago
FWIW, a couple of years back I had a gentleman who was a 30 year mainframe programmer in a Rails & Postgres class that I taught. He learned both, was humble enough to take an internship for a Rails job at over 50 and then turned it into full employment.
Anecdotal, but I found it interesting to watch the portability of experience.
- hathawsh 8y agoIMHO the key is your student has programming skills mixed with humility. When I'm hiring, that's all I'm really looking for, and I think that's true for most coding jobs, mainframe or not.
- mywittyname 8y agoThis answer is pretty telling... Thirty years of mainframe experience and at the end of it, all you're qualified for is an internship.
- brightball 8y agoHonestly, I assumed there was going to be more of an age bias working against him than anything else. He picked things up very quickly.
- ams6110 8y agoHonestly, COBOL is not that different from any other imperative programming language. A bit more verbose perhaps, but if you are a good COBOL programmer you could pick up another language without much trouble.