6 ms·

I am suspicious about the alleged problem finding people willing to work with COBOL. Generally, if it's crucial for the business, the lever you pull is increas

by jawns 5y ago

I am suspicious about the alleged problem finding people willing to work with COBOL. Generally, if it's crucial for the business, the lever you pull is increasing compensation until the market responds. That's how you influence willingness. People are willing to do much dirtier jobs given enough money. "But we need someone who is not only willing but able," they say, meaning they want someone with many years of experience with the language. These same companies did not invest the time or money to train future maintainers in the language or make it worth their while to accumulate that experience. Guess what happens when you don't invest that money up front? You pay for it dearly later on. So it's either an impossible situation of their own making, or those elusive COBOL programmers are out there, but companies significantly underestimate how much they really need to shell out for such a specialized skill set. Either way, I don't think the problem can be reduced to younger programmers wanting to write code in the hip newer languages.

robbedpeter 5y ago
Best case scenario is they go broke and decommission the obsolete system, with it being replaced by a competitor using better tech or planning, or leaving an opportunity in the market for such.
nerdponx 5y ago
This is a microcosm of the "STEM shortage" in general. Socialize the losses/costs (publicly-funded school), privatize the gains/profits. That said, there's a different side to the issue, which is that smaller companies do not (and never did) have the resources to train people. There definitely is a shortage of senior management-capable technical people who can lead projects and teams at smaller organizations. This however isn't relevant to big banks and Cobol.
- Retric 5y ago
  There are huge incentives to talk up a shortage in X because the labor market self trains. So, no we’ve never had a nursing shortage etc, but talking about it is a great way to save some money. The only signal worth paying attention to is industry salary trends, but reporters rarely have the time or incentives to actually do real reporting.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    The thing is - the bank referenced in the story has COBOL programmers, but they kept recalling the effective COBOL programmer. That's the issue with self-training for mission critical systems. Sure, some people can self-train, but a company doesn't want to pay people to learn on the job, while thwey are counting the beans.
Guest42 5y ago
I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common those legacy code bases are.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Right. This is a "shortage of Lamborghinis... at the $10,000 price point."
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    There is a "shortage of housing in SF ... for $100,000."
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      If the going rate for COBOL programmers was towards the top of the Software Engineer market, that would be an apt comparison. Trouble is, the going rate for COBOL programmers is at the bottom of the Software Engineer payscale.
      - smnrchrds 5y ago
        The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. Even the fact that prices are consistently increasing doesn't mean that there is a labour shortage. It's only a shortage if you cannot buy labour at any price. It is not what you specifically are arguing here, but I have read different iterations of the above dozens of times on HN and it is always highly upvoted and almost all comments are in support of this position. I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        But surely there is a shortage, and you can't just pay more. My mom knew COBOL. She retired in the 1970s. You're going to have a tough time hiring her now.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
q-rews 5y ago
Yes but also no. How can they find senior COBOL developers if there are no Junior COBOL jobs? Sure someone might pick it up for the money but they will not have “X years of experience” required to work on incredibly sensitive money systems.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Eh, with COBOL I can just see them not existing at a reasonable price point and not having any avenues to gain the experience from senior people. Say that you have a pair of chickens that people really want chicks from. Pay whatever you want. You cannot really speed up chick production because of that initial bottleneck.
surfsvammel 5y ago
The problem is real, for many banks, but it’s not as big problem as it would seem. I know one bank who does an academy thing, where they bring in graduates, train them for up to two years (with salary) for them to be able to work on the systems. So, it’s a problem, but they have knows to get around it. Also. This problem is not isolated to banks. I saw the same kinds of problems when I was in telecom.
ransom1538 5y ago
"That's how you influence willingness. People are willing to do much dirtier jobs given enough money." Sort of. I dealt with a large smalltalk system with it's own datastore. Finding smalltalk devs was painful. Training new ones? It was a mess. The dev environments didn't seem to port correctly to modern linux systems - mac? forget it, we could never work out contracts with Cincom Systems to get proper licenses - they would demand us pay a portion of revenue with audit rights (wtf), staging environments were layers of hacks, smalltalk could work on port 80 but making it work with apache/nginx/load balancers was always a mess, smalltalk itself was covered in bugs and would crash for no apparent reason. All new devs knew learning smalltalk was a waste of their future job prospects - they also had no good mentors. Good luck finding things on stackoverflow. The smalltalk contractors that could help would just raise their price so high it turned into extortion (one of them even wanted a portion of gross revenue). These contractors would delete histories, use hand written journals, hide documentation, refused to train anyone, not use version control, quit in the middle of meetings -- and they all were friends - it was a total shakedown. "Just pay them more" never really worked out for us.
- tdeck 5y ago
  My uncle was a smalltalk developer for a while - growing up I never realized how unusual that was. What kinds of things is it used for these days?
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  > A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. Then they behaved like Oracle, Terradata and every other "business-sensible" vendor, who manages to get his customer into a technology-based lock-in. The only way Oracle only shakes down customers for tens of millions per year and not for billions is that, if it were billions, companies would just invest into migrating off Oracle.
_blu 5y ago
Money is not the primary motivation for doing something. This is big myth. In all surveys where I come from, money comes quite a bit down on the list on what employees look for in a job. Additionally, there are factors that might be surprising, like trends (what is considered "cool", or "correct" or "noble" etc).
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Money is not the primary motivation for doing something. This is big myth. This depends on the culture, how honest those people are being, the greater economic situation of the people in question and many other factors. For a general overview, the StackOverflow developer survey (n=65'000) seems to suggest that about 70% of the respondents feel like compensation indeed matters a lot, more than any other factor: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-job-hunt-factors https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-job-hunt... > For the first time, we asked developers what drove them to look for a new job. Better compensation was by far the most common factor for respondents with 70% of them noting that more pay was important. Wanting to work with new technologies was the second most popular factor, which is consistent with what respondents reported as one of the most important priorities when choosing between two jobs. Curiously, they skipped that question in the 2021 survey, so it's not included at all. I can personally understand this viewpoint, seeing as i don't receive all that much money either and it would take me about 40 years of constant work to be able to afford my own house with my current earnings and small raises here and there. Plus, with my current salary there's no way i could afford, for example, cancer treatment or to address any of the other serious health issues that can arise in people.
- OJFord 5y ago
  It's probably higher up most people's list than 'programming language I will be using' though?
KronisLV 5y ago
> Guess what happens when you don't invest that money up front? You pay for it dearly later on. But that's the thing - these companies don't expect to be the ones to invest in these developers over the years, to let them upskill themselves. Neither do other companies. If you look at /r/CSCareerQuestions, you'll find that many of the younger devs are having quite a lot of trouble finding work, very few companies wanting to invest in the start of their careers, since they might as well just look for the more experienced devs out there. But why is that? Simply because there is no actual guaranteed return on such an investment. A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. In essence, all of this investment will return this company absolutely nothing and instead will benefit the next company that this developer goes to, which might as well be their direct competitor. Why should companies take this risk, instead of letting other companies do so, train the juniors for them and simply pluck skilled devs from the market when they become available? I don't condone that approach, but it feels to me like a zero sum game, especially in a competitive market. I don't have any solutions to offer, since in my eyes preparing devs should be the work of universities AND some other institution after getting their education, that would bring them up to speed to actual industry practices (like bootcamps, but for people with basic knowledge of academia). Yet, even after getting my Master's, in lieu of such an organization, i simply had to get the practical skills over many evenings and weekends, as well as worked as a developer thanks to one of the companies that did take a risk on me, all while i was also studying. Having to work in the evenings and weekends seems a bit silly when compared with other industries, but with how much churn there is in regards to tech, i don't see alternatives.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  > A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. There's simple solution to people leaving - just pay them above market rates. In my current company, a manager had this crazy idea, and what do you know - a lot of the key people he hired (most of them were excellent to begin with, as when you advertise above-market pay, you attract some pretty great people) are still with us 5 years later, and are being the pillars of their teams and of entire departments.
lordnacho 5y ago
Expected earnings is what you think you'll get for this job plus what you think you'll get for jobs further down the line. Even if a COBOL job paid a lot you wouldn't expect to hold it forever and there's a fair chance you'll have issues getting the next job if you haven't done something more common.

by jawns 5y ago

robbedpeter 5y ago

Best case scenario is they go broke and decommission the obsolete system, with it being replaced by a competitor using better tech or planning, or leaving an opportunity in the market for such.

nerdponx 5y ago

This is a microcosm of the "STEM shortage" in general. Socialize the losses/costs (publicly-funded school), privatize the gains/profits. That said, there's a different side to the issue, which is that smaller companies do not (and never did) have the resources to train people. There definitely is a shortage of senior management-capable technical people who can lead projects and teams at smaller organizations. This however isn't relevant to big banks and Cobol.

Retric 5y ago
There are huge incentives to talk up a shortage in X because the labor market self trains. So, no we’ve never had a nursing shortage etc, but talking about it is a great way to save some money. The only signal worth paying attention to is industry salary trends, but reporters rarely have the time or incentives to actually do real reporting.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  The thing is - the bank referenced in the story has COBOL programmers, but they kept recalling the effective COBOL programmer. That's the issue with self-training for mission critical systems. Sure, some people can self-train, but a company doesn't want to pay people to learn on the job, while thwey are counting the beans.

Guest42 5y ago

I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common those legacy code bases are.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Right. This is a "shortage of Lamborghinis... at the $10,000 price point."
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  There is a "shortage of housing in SF ... for $100,000."
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    If the going rate for COBOL programmers was towards the top of the Software Engineer market, that would be an apt comparison. Trouble is, the going rate for COBOL programmers is at the bottom of the Software Engineer payscale.
    - smnrchrds 5y ago
      The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. Even the fact that prices are consistently increasing doesn't mean that there is a labour shortage. It's only a shortage if you cannot buy labour at any price. It is not what you specifically are arguing here, but I have read different iterations of the above dozens of times on HN and it is always highly upvoted and almost all comments are in support of this position. I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        But surely there is a shortage, and you can't just pay more. My mom knew COBOL. She retired in the 1970s. You're going to have a tough time hiring her now.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

q-rews 5y ago

Yes but also no. How can they find senior COBOL developers if there are no Junior COBOL jobs? Sure someone might pick it up for the money but they will not have “X years of experience” required to work on incredibly sensitive money systems.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Eh, with COBOL I can just see them not existing at a reasonable price point and not having any avenues to gain the experience from senior people. Say that you have a pair of chickens that people really want chicks from. Pay whatever you want. You cannot really speed up chick production because of that initial bottleneck.

surfsvammel 5y ago

The problem is real, for many banks, but it’s not as big problem as it would seem. I know one bank who does an academy thing, where they bring in graduates, train them for up to two years (with salary) for them to be able to work on the systems. So, it’s a problem, but they have knows to get around it. Also. This problem is not isolated to banks. I saw the same kinds of problems when I was in telecom.

ransom1538 5y ago

"That's how you influence willingness. People are willing to do much dirtier jobs given enough money." Sort of. I dealt with a large smalltalk system with it's own datastore. Finding smalltalk devs was painful. Training new ones? It was a mess. The dev environments didn't seem to port correctly to modern linux systems - mac? forget it, we could never work out contracts with Cincom Systems to get proper licenses - they would demand us pay a portion of revenue with audit rights (wtf), staging environments were layers of hacks, smalltalk could work on port 80 but making it work with apache/nginx/load balancers was always a mess, smalltalk itself was covered in bugs and would crash for no apparent reason. All new devs knew learning smalltalk was a waste of their future job prospects - they also had no good mentors. Good luck finding things on stackoverflow. The smalltalk contractors that could help would just raise their price so high it turned into extortion (one of them even wanted a portion of gross revenue). These contractors would delete histories, use hand written journals, hide documentation, refused to train anyone, not use version control, quit in the middle of meetings -- and they all were friends - it was a total shakedown. "Just pay them more" never really worked out for us.

tdeck 5y ago
My uncle was a smalltalk developer for a while - growing up I never realized how unusual that was. What kinds of things is it used for these days?
burntoutfire 5y ago
> A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. Then they behaved like Oracle, Terradata and every other "business-sensible" vendor, who manages to get his customer into a technology-based lock-in. The only way Oracle only shakes down customers for tens of millions per year and not for billions is that, if it were billions, companies would just invest into migrating off Oracle.

_blu 5y ago

Money is not the primary motivation for doing something. This is big myth. In all surveys where I come from, money comes quite a bit down on the list on what employees look for in a job. Additionally, there are factors that might be surprising, like trends (what is considered "cool", or "correct" or "noble" etc).

KronisLV 5y ago
> Money is not the primary motivation for doing something. This is big myth. This depends on the culture, how honest those people are being, the greater economic situation of the people in question and many other factors. For a general overview, the StackOverflow developer survey (n=65'000) seems to suggest that about 70% of the respondents feel like compensation indeed matters a lot, more than any other factor: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-job-hunt-factors https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-job-hunt... > For the first time, we asked developers what drove them to look for a new job. Better compensation was by far the most common factor for respondents with 70% of them noting that more pay was important. Wanting to work with new technologies was the second most popular factor, which is consistent with what respondents reported as one of the most important priorities when choosing between two jobs. Curiously, they skipped that question in the 2021 survey, so it's not included at all. I can personally understand this viewpoint, seeing as i don't receive all that much money either and it would take me about 40 years of constant work to be able to afford my own house with my current earnings and small raises here and there. Plus, with my current salary there's no way i could afford, for example, cancer treatment or to address any of the other serious health issues that can arise in people.
OJFord 5y ago
It's probably higher up most people's list than 'programming language I will be using' though?

KronisLV 5y ago

> Guess what happens when you don't invest that money up front? You pay for it dearly later on. But that's the thing - these companies don't expect to be the ones to invest in these developers over the years, to let them upskill themselves. Neither do other companies. If you look at /r/CSCareerQuestions, you'll find that many of the younger devs are having quite a lot of trouble finding work, very few companies wanting to invest in the start of their careers, since they might as well just look for the more experienced devs out there. But why is that? Simply because there is no actual guaranteed return on such an investment. A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. In essence, all of this investment will return this company absolutely nothing and instead will benefit the next company that this developer goes to, which might as well be their direct competitor. Why should companies take this risk, instead of letting other companies do so, train the juniors for them and simply pluck skilled devs from the market when they become available? I don't condone that approach, but it feels to me like a zero sum game, especially in a competitive market. I don't have any solutions to offer, since in my eyes preparing devs should be the work of universities AND some other institution after getting their education, that would bring them up to speed to actual industry practices (like bootcamps, but for people with basic knowledge of academia). Yet, even after getting my Master's, in lieu of such an organization, i simply had to get the practical skills over many evenings and weekends, as well as worked as a developer thanks to one of the companies that did take a risk on me, all while i was also studying. Having to work in the evenings and weekends seems a bit silly when compared with other industries, but with how much churn there is in regards to tech, i don't see alternatives.

burntoutfire 5y ago
> A company might as well spend months of their experienced developers' time while making them mentor the more junior devs and invest a lot of resources in this, as well as have more overhead to their development because of needing to spend longer on QA and fixing bugs introduced by these juniors, for them to just turn around and leave when they've gotten the seniority that they desire. There's simple solution to people leaving - just pay them above market rates. In my current company, a manager had this crazy idea, and what do you know - a lot of the key people he hired (most of them were excellent to begin with, as when you advertise above-market pay, you attract some pretty great people) are still with us 5 years later, and are being the pillars of their teams and of entire departments.

lordnacho 5y ago

Expected earnings is what you think you'll get for this job plus what you think you'll get for jobs further down the line. Even if a COBOL job paid a lot you wouldn't expect to hold it forever and there's a fair chance you'll have issues getting the next job if you haven't done something more common.