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As with everything in life: Get your ego out of the way. People tend to identify themselves with technology they mastered and miss out on all the improvements
by k__ 6y ago
As with everything in life: Get your ego out of the way.
People tend to identify themselves with technology they mastered and miss out on all the improvements that happen. This works for a few decades if they're lucky, but someday they're old and wonder why nobody values their skills in an obsolete technology.
We can't all maintain Cobol code bases when we are 50.
- JJMcJ 6y agoI hope you are aware that 50 year olds started working 1990 to 1995 or even later, when there was a lot more than just COBOL going on. In fact, a 50 year old is more likely to have caught the rise of desktop GUIs and of Linux than have spent a career doing COBOL.
- k__ 6y agoI know. It was a joke that targeted the argument: "You know that old tech is still in use? Look at all the COBOL used in industry XYZ."
- PostThisTooFast 6y agoAt that time, COBOL was still huge in big-ass manufacturing systems, such as those in aerospace & defense. In the early 1990s, Accenture (then Andersen Consulting), put every incoming employee through six weeks of on-campus programming training that was taught entirely in COBOL. It was old-school even then. I was also amused to note that all of the daily-announcement monitors in the hallways of their training facility were being driven by an Atari 800. Yep, well into the '90s.
- catwind7 6y agoThis is so easy to forget. I think when we're in the trenches it's quite hard to pull back and view what you're doing as means to an end and the means (libraries, frameworks) change constantly. I think it's also difficult in practice because it feels good to master things in general. It's a nice feeling to know that you know a system inside and out, so detaching from that is going to be hard no matter what especially if you've invested quite a bit of your life into it