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If it’s anything like legacy public service code in my country it’s not just that, it’s also dealing with terrible organisational culture, d-grade devs, c-grade

If it’s anything like legacy public service code in my country it’s not just that, it’s also dealing with terrible organisational culture, d-grade devs, c-grade contractors and corrupt management that let it get that way (as millions are dumped on the contractors, as it turns out). Some days I wish an ultra virus would take out computers as we know it so we’d be forced to start again with what we know now, namely not creating these monolithic nasty monsters.

chx 7y ago
Yes and no remote work as far as I am aware of these things. It just sucks. If it wouldn't suck, I would've went into it: I like retro and COBOL is not a hard language to learn, really, it is not.
grogenaut 7y ago
Cool we'd have a bunch of new monsters based on a super old version of nodejs instead.
- Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  I’m not saying you can’t write a monster in node (nor would I recommend writing complex apps in it) but modern systems are somewhat less monolithic, if a component is garbage rebuild it, run unit/integration tests and push to business to verify. You can’t do that when your application is such a black box even the devs don’t truly know how it works, which often seems to be the case with legacy cobol.
  - grogenaut 7y ago
    Cool you missed "actually understand the legacy system" and went right to the grand rewrite into microservices. If you can't be bothered to understand one service from 30 years ago, how is someone 30 years from now going to understand your 45 service masterpiece let alone run the out of date kube cluster you deployed it to.
    - Bnshsysjab 7y ago
      You’re putting words into my mouth I never mentioned microservices and think that largely they’re a mistake (except SSO). I also never mentioned node. At a glance I assume C# or Java would be the best fit but I’m not a system architect so my POV is probably mute. Policy should define how a system works so go read that. It’s not like you build an entire system, delete the old one, drop in the new turn it on and really really hope that it just works as intended. But you’re right, lets just pay IBM, SAP, Oracle billions every yeah because rebuilding is too hard. But you keep projecting on me with opinions I don’t even agree with lol. I’d hate to ever work with you. Edit: but like k8s or not, code defined infra is a good idea - even if k8s suffers a terrible death enough detail should be documented that migration into the next big thing won’t be terribly hard. but you shouldn’t worry about that, your legacy java fat client app has so many undocumented legacy dependencies that containerisation will never be an option lol.
moron4hire 7y ago
Yeah, did my time working in consulting for state gov bureaus. Some of the worst working environments I've ever been in. Asshole, down-right criminal managers. IT actively pirating software. Computers literally falling apart. Not sure you could pay me enough to go back. Maybe for something ludicrous, like $3mil/yr and mutual termination at any time. I could probably put up with it for 4 months. These places that "can't find COBOL programmers" need to stop blaming universities and start taking a harder look at themselves.

chx 7y ago

Yes and no remote work as far as I am aware of these things. It just sucks. If it wouldn't suck, I would've went into it: I like retro and COBOL is not a hard language to learn, really, it is not.

grogenaut 7y ago

Cool we'd have a bunch of new monsters based on a super old version of nodejs instead.

Bnshsysjab 7y ago
I’m not saying you can’t write a monster in node (nor would I recommend writing complex apps in it) but modern systems are somewhat less monolithic, if a component is garbage rebuild it, run unit/integration tests and push to business to verify. You can’t do that when your application is such a black box even the devs don’t truly know how it works, which often seems to be the case with legacy cobol.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  Cool you missed "actually understand the legacy system" and went right to the grand rewrite into microservices. If you can't be bothered to understand one service from 30 years ago, how is someone 30 years from now going to understand your 45 service masterpiece let alone run the out of date kube cluster you deployed it to.
  - Bnshsysjab 7y ago
    You’re putting words into my mouth I never mentioned microservices and think that largely they’re a mistake (except SSO). I also never mentioned node. At a glance I assume C# or Java would be the best fit but I’m not a system architect so my POV is probably mute. Policy should define how a system works so go read that. It’s not like you build an entire system, delete the old one, drop in the new turn it on and really really hope that it just works as intended. But you’re right, lets just pay IBM, SAP, Oracle billions every yeah because rebuilding is too hard. But you keep projecting on me with opinions I don’t even agree with lol. I’d hate to ever work with you. Edit: but like k8s or not, code defined infra is a good idea - even if k8s suffers a terrible death enough detail should be documented that migration into the next big thing won’t be terribly hard. but you shouldn’t worry about that, your legacy java fat client app has so many undocumented legacy dependencies that containerisation will never be an option lol.

moron4hire 7y ago

Yeah, did my time working in consulting for state gov bureaus. Some of the worst working environments I've ever been in. Asshole, down-right criminal managers. IT actively pirating software. Computers literally falling apart. Not sure you could pay me enough to go back. Maybe for something ludicrous, like $3mil/yr and mutual termination at any time. I could probably put up with it for 4 months. These places that "can't find COBOL programmers" need to stop blaming universities and start taking a harder look at themselves.