3 ms·

I recently got talked into developing a new project with Kubernetes and microservices. It's an interesting journey but the complexity this adds is just enormous

I recently got talked into developing a new project with Kubernetes and microservices. It's an interesting journey but the complexity this adds is just enormous. Debugging is hard, refactoring is hard once it touches service boundaries, coordinating releases between services is hard and so on. I highly doubt that we will ever scale to a size where the complexity pays off. I feel this kind architecture of especially appeals to people who like to write only new code instead of understanding existing code. They don't like to read old code to see where new functionality may fit in so they spin up new services. We are complaining about maintenance of old COBOL code but God be with the poor people who in 20 years will have to maintain the monstrosities we are creating today.

mech422 5y ago
>>We are complaining about maintenance of old COBOL code but God be with the poor people who in 20 years will have to maintain the monstrosities we are creating today. I'm hoping for some major tax changes right before my retirement so I can dust off my COBOL and get phat lewt! I wonder how many people that have actually written COBOL will be left by 2030? No one mentions it here, but I'm sure there must be programmers deep in the bowels of banks and insurance companies that are learning COBOL even now? Oh - And RPG... wonder if there's any of that left ?
- yurishimo 5y ago
  There are definitely new devs learning COBOL. I'm not sure where I saw it, but I could have sworn I saw an article or blog post about these mission critical companies paying insane wages and signing bonuses to devs who would sign-on to learn & maintain their infrastructure. And since these jobs would likely be on prem for security reasons, they don't have to pay insane Silicon Valley wages either. Imagine living in Cincinnati making $250k maintaining COBOL? Some people are totally fine with that paradigm and will keep the system running as long as it needs to.
  - mech422 5y ago
    I was down until the on-prem thing.. Still, I wouldn't be surprised about insane wages for COBOL. You make money at the bleeding edge of tech, or way back on the tail end - scarcity breeds profit :-)
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    i think most of the highly paid COBOL devs are a myth. I looked into this a while ago and after talking to some people I got the impression that these jobs don't pay well at all. This may be the reason why nobody wants to do it. I bet otherwise they would have no problem finding plenty of people who are OK with making 250k in Cincinnati.

mech422 5y ago

>>We are complaining about maintenance of old COBOL code but God be with the poor people who in 20 years will have to maintain the monstrosities we are creating today. I'm hoping for some major tax changes right before my retirement so I can dust off my COBOL and get phat lewt! I wonder how many people that have actually written COBOL will be left by 2030? No one mentions it here, but I'm sure there must be programmers deep in the bowels of banks and insurance companies that are learning COBOL even now? Oh - And RPG... wonder if there's any of that left ?

yurishimo 5y ago
There are definitely new devs learning COBOL. I'm not sure where I saw it, but I could have sworn I saw an article or blog post about these mission critical companies paying insane wages and signing bonuses to devs who would sign-on to learn & maintain their infrastructure. And since these jobs would likely be on prem for security reasons, they don't have to pay insane Silicon Valley wages either. Imagine living in Cincinnati making $250k maintaining COBOL? Some people are totally fine with that paradigm and will keep the system running as long as it needs to.
- mech422 5y ago
  I was down until the on-prem thing.. Still, I wouldn't be surprised about insane wages for COBOL. You make money at the bleeding edge of tech, or way back on the tail end - scarcity breeds profit :-)
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  i think most of the highly paid COBOL devs are a myth. I looked into this a while ago and after talking to some people I got the impression that these jobs don't pay well at all. This may be the reason why nobody wants to do it. I bet otherwise they would have no problem finding plenty of people who are OK with making 250k in Cincinnati.