5 ms·

Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? It seems like the teachers tale of someone cracking their head open while swinging on their chair - presumably

by mhh__ 5y ago

Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? It seems like the teachers tale of someone cracking their head open while swinging on their chair - presumably they exist but there can't be that many of them?

splistud 5y ago
More than a hundred, probably less than 500
pjdemers 5y ago
I used to do consulting in banks. I met several Cobol programmers. However, they thought of their role as CICS programmers. CICS is a mainframe transaction management tool. All of them also did assembly in CICS.
philipswood 5y ago
I met some Cobol programmers in an open office space at a bank. Pleasant, relaxed bunch.
Kaytaro 5y ago
My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect, but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's job" so maybe that's it.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I worked at an investment bank in the 1990s. Their programming staff (and IT staff in general) was roughly half female. I think it's more common in companies where IT is a supporting function and not the core business. By contrast, the tech companies I've worked at have all been almost entirely male.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.
  - dralley 5y ago
    It started a little earlier than that, but yes.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    The change came about when it became possible to have your own computer (VIC-20, Spectrum, etc). This put computers into the hands of teenagers. Relatively few female teenagers wanted to spend all their waking hours hacking assembler. This meant that the intake to CS undergrad programs became dominated by young men who had been programming for 10 years already. The women who did take CS were now at a large disadvantage in terms of experience.
- flomo 5y ago
  I've read that IBM offered training programs to secretaries, so it was a good career path. And there was a stereotype that typing = woman's work.
- aksss 5y ago
  Not that it's germane to gender-balance of 'greyhairs', but COBOL was invented by a woman, Grace Hopper, after all. I'm not sure I can think of a new mainstream language initially authored by a female these days.
forinti 5y ago
I worked with some at a bank (of course). Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server and it's incredible how some old names in IT can still charge enormous fees for some very old software.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server No it isn't. But I grant that there are probably people who incorrectly call their 1U servers "mainframes".
- dralley 5y ago
  No, that is not even remotely close to being true. Pretty much every aspect of a mainframe is architecturally massively different from a big rack of standard servers.
brundolf 5y ago
I think the field of tech is more segmented than many realize (in terms of culture, technology, even geography to an extent) For example, I've got a decent-sized network and I've only ever met one person who works in government tech. And it wasn't through that network. But you can't tell me the government doesn't have legions of people working on its systems. Even talking with this friend about work is like speaking another language. He builds, tests, and manages huge digital systems, but all of it is done using this product called Microsoft Dynamics, which I'd never even heard of. He doesn't really write any code, but the medium he works in is as complex and powerful as a programming language ecosystem. Yet there's almost no crossover between the jobs each of us might apply for. It's like an uncanny, alternate universe, coexisting with the one I live in. I think there are many such universes and it's entirely possible to go through your career without ever meeting someone from one of the others.
- jl6 5y ago
  100%. SAP is another ERP parallel universe, with its own language (ABAP), industry certification schemes, conferences, publications, culture... These vendors specialize in solving the nexus of unfun problems that sit at the heart of every large organization (invoicing & expenses, accounting, payroll, budgeting & forecasting, financial statements…) and I believe them to be quite well insulated from the forces of open source and consumerization that have shaped the wider industry, because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative. Workday has come closest.
  - aksss 5y ago
    > because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience is highly risk-adverse, and the problem domain is highly risk-prone. There's an enormous incentive to go with an industry "known good" even if you know you're getting thrown over a barrel. ERP conversion are highly, highly likely to fail in terms of on-budget, on-time (more so than the general abysmal record of IT projects). Lack of business ownership/knowledge of processes and requirements is usually at the heart of it, IME. I've been through a couple SAP implementations, a couple SAP upgrades, and conversions to other platforms in my earlier life (Deltek, Dynamics), and they are truly the worst projects on the planet to do. In the government contracting space, Deltek (which most have never even heard of) is such a winner with accounting departments because they're playing to government auditors - the level of scrutiny from just saying "we run Deltek" compared to some roll-your-own solution is miles of difference and ultimate cost. I don't have any relationship with or love for Deltek, btw, this is just my IRL observation and an example of what the "customer" is thinking about - they could care less about technology stack. I think most finance departments just "mind the machine" they have - it's really rare (again, IME) to find people in a finance department who have expert knowledge of the key business processes, report audiences/dependencies, and how everything ties together. You can throw a ton of business analysts at it and still find dark corners that went unaddressed after or the night before go-live. And you're impacting things like payroll, benefits calculations, vendor payments, invoicing, taxation, etc. High risk stuff to kludge up.
garyrob 5y ago
I wrote a lot of COBOL "back in the day" (the 80's) and I don't think it would take me much effort to get back up to speed. So I think I can fairly count myself as a COBOL programmer! That being said, I like languages that came later much more, and absolutely would not choose to create a project today using it. I also wrote a lot of Pascal in the 80's, then moved to C/C++ and Python. Python is the language I've used the most in the 2000's, but now I'm studying Typescript, and think that is a perfectly fine language which I plan to use professionally. I've also studied OCaml and Rust and would absolutely choose the latter now for anything where efficiency was a prime requirement.
webnrrd2k 5y ago
I knew a small department of cobol programmers. I worked one bay over from them in the mid 90's. They had a million+ line program that did the payroll for a major aerospace company. Honestly, it seemed like they had a pretty good job. Decent pay, decent benefits, decent hours, not much stress, no ageism, etc .. a great way to raise a family.
slivanes 5y ago
I was one of the kids that cracked their head open rocking on a chair (in grade 2), and I have also programmed some COBOL although not commercially.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? I've met quite a few. I spent a year in a mainframe team in Amex and I worked in COBOL, JCL and REXX. I preferred REXX, but COBOL is not that bad. JCL is a horror. I worked in that team in 2016. The median age in the team was around 40 ish but there were a few outliers, including myself and a couple of others. I was also acquainted with many dozens of third-party contractors who worked for Amex programming mainframes. If you haven't met many COBOL programmers yourself, the reason might be that a) you've never worked in a big financial corp and b) you don't hang out with programmers from big contractor companies a lot. To clarify, most of my career in the industry before and after that I was working with more modern languages, like C# and Python.
michaelcampbell 5y ago
Not in many years, but I did COBOL professionally for a few years.
sien 5y ago
Yes. Almost all of them were older than 50 though. Probably most governments still have them. Social security and health payments from governments probably go through Cobol code.
jamesfinlayson 5y ago
Not really - I used to work with a guy that had touched some COBOL at a previous job (not a bank) but that was it. I haven't worked a bank so I guess that's why I haven't crossed paths with one.
gassiss 5y ago
I've worked with at least 10 of them maintaining systems for a big insurance company
phoehne 5y ago
Yes. I had to learn to read COBOL using VSAM to port reports to a Cognos product and Oracle. One of the COBOL devs pulled me aside one day after we were happy to get one of the reports down to a few minutes. (I'll gladly admit that Cognos was a big part of the run-time cost). He ran the legacy report on the mainframe and it took well under a second. Not saying that mainframes are better but I felt like we'd actually wasted our time polishing a turd (Cognos) instead of doing something useful.
- cafard 5y ago
  Cognos! I remember looking in amazement at the SQL generated by Cognos.
cafard 5y ago
Several, yes, but at this point the ones I know are all retired.

by mhh__ 5y ago

splistud 5y ago

More than a hundred, probably less than 500

pjdemers 5y ago

I used to do consulting in banks. I met several Cobol programmers. However, they thought of their role as CICS programmers. CICS is a mainframe transaction management tool. All of them also did assembly in CICS.

philipswood 5y ago

I met some Cobol programmers in an open office space at a bank. Pleasant, relaxed bunch.

Kaytaro 5y ago

My job involves a lot of projects with IBM i and Z so I meet a lot of them. It's pretty much the "greybeards" you'd expect, but also surprisingly there's a LOT of older women in these roles. Like, proportionally way more than an in open systems world in my experience. I've always wondered why that is, I have heard that programming used to be considered a "woman's job" so maybe that's it.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I worked at an investment bank in the 1990s. Their programming staff (and IT staff in general) was roughly half female. I think it's more common in companies where IT is a supporting function and not the core business. By contrast, the tech companies I've worked at have all been almost entirely male.
jcranmer 5y ago
From what I've been told, CS was a pretty balanced industry in terms of gender until the dot-com bubble, where it became very heavily male-skewed and hasn't recovered since.
- dralley 5y ago
  It started a little earlier than that, but yes.
- dboreham 5y ago
  The change came about when it became possible to have your own computer (VIC-20, Spectrum, etc). This put computers into the hands of teenagers. Relatively few female teenagers wanted to spend all their waking hours hacking assembler. This meant that the intake to CS undergrad programs became dominated by young men who had been programming for 10 years already. The women who did take CS were now at a large disadvantage in terms of experience.
flomo 5y ago
I've read that IBM offered training programs to secretaries, so it was a good career path. And there was a stereotype that typing = woman's work.
aksss 5y ago
Not that it's germane to gender-balance of 'greyhairs', but COBOL was invented by a woman, Grace Hopper, after all. I'm not sure I can think of a new mainstream language initially authored by a female these days.

forinti 5y ago

I worked with some at a bank (of course). Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server and it's incredible how some old names in IT can still charge enormous fees for some very old software.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> Nowadays a "mainframe" is just a 1U server No it isn't. But I grant that there are probably people who incorrectly call their 1U servers "mainframes".
dralley 5y ago
No, that is not even remotely close to being true. Pretty much every aspect of a mainframe is architecturally massively different from a big rack of standard servers.

brundolf 5y ago

I think the field of tech is more segmented than many realize (in terms of culture, technology, even geography to an extent) For example, I've got a decent-sized network and I've only ever met one person who works in government tech. And it wasn't through that network. But you can't tell me the government doesn't have legions of people working on its systems. Even talking with this friend about work is like speaking another language. He builds, tests, and manages huge digital systems, but all of it is done using this product called Microsoft Dynamics, which I'd never even heard of. He doesn't really write any code, but the medium he works in is as complex and powerful as a programming language ecosystem. Yet there's almost no crossover between the jobs each of us might apply for. It's like an uncanny, alternate universe, coexisting with the one I live in. I think there are many such universes and it's entirely possible to go through your career without ever meeting someone from one of the others.

jl6 5y ago
100%. SAP is another ERP parallel universe, with its own language (ABAP), industry certification schemes, conferences, publications, culture... These vendors specialize in solving the nexus of unfun problems that sit at the heart of every large organization (invoicing & expenses, accounting, payroll, budgeting & forecasting, financial statements…) and I believe them to be quite well insulated from the forces of open source and consumerization that have shaped the wider industry, because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative. Workday has come closest.
- aksss 5y ago
  > because there is no consumer/hobbyist path to creating an alternative I think one of the biggest impediments is that the audience is highly risk-adverse, and the problem domain is highly risk-prone. There's an enormous incentive to go with an industry "known good" even if you know you're getting thrown over a barrel. ERP conversion are highly, highly likely to fail in terms of on-budget, on-time (more so than the general abysmal record of IT projects). Lack of business ownership/knowledge of processes and requirements is usually at the heart of it, IME. I've been through a couple SAP implementations, a couple SAP upgrades, and conversions to other platforms in my earlier life (Deltek, Dynamics), and they are truly the worst projects on the planet to do. In the government contracting space, Deltek (which most have never even heard of) is such a winner with accounting departments because they're playing to government auditors - the level of scrutiny from just saying "we run Deltek" compared to some roll-your-own solution is miles of difference and ultimate cost. I don't have any relationship with or love for Deltek, btw, this is just my IRL observation and an example of what the "customer" is thinking about - they could care less about technology stack. I think most finance departments just "mind the machine" they have - it's really rare (again, IME) to find people in a finance department who have expert knowledge of the key business processes, report audiences/dependencies, and how everything ties together. You can throw a ton of business analysts at it and still find dark corners that went unaddressed after or the night before go-live. And you're impacting things like payroll, benefits calculations, vendor payments, invoicing, taxation, etc. High risk stuff to kludge up.

garyrob 5y ago

I wrote a lot of COBOL "back in the day" (the 80's) and I don't think it would take me much effort to get back up to speed. So I think I can fairly count myself as a COBOL programmer! That being said, I like languages that came later much more, and absolutely would not choose to create a project today using it. I also wrote a lot of Pascal in the 80's, then moved to C/C++ and Python. Python is the language I've used the most in the 2000's, but now I'm studying Typescript, and think that is a perfectly fine language which I plan to use professionally. I've also studied OCaml and Rust and would absolutely choose the latter now for anything where efficiency was a prime requirement.

webnrrd2k 5y ago

I knew a small department of cobol programmers. I worked one bay over from them in the mid 90's. They had a million+ line program that did the payroll for a major aerospace company. Honestly, it seemed like they had a pretty good job. Decent pay, decent benefits, decent hours, not much stress, no ageism, etc .. a great way to raise a family.

slivanes 5y ago

I was one of the kids that cracked their head open rocking on a chair (in grade 2), and I have also programmed some COBOL although not commercially.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

>> Has anyone ever actually met a COBOL programmer? I've met quite a few. I spent a year in a mainframe team in Amex and I worked in COBOL, JCL and REXX. I preferred REXX, but COBOL is not that bad. JCL is a horror. I worked in that team in 2016. The median age in the team was around 40 ish but there were a few outliers, including myself and a couple of others. I was also acquainted with many dozens of third-party contractors who worked for Amex programming mainframes. If you haven't met many COBOL programmers yourself, the reason might be that a) you've never worked in a big financial corp and b) you don't hang out with programmers from big contractor companies a lot. To clarify, most of my career in the industry before and after that I was working with more modern languages, like C# and Python.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

Not in many years, but I did COBOL professionally for a few years.

sien 5y ago

Yes. Almost all of them were older than 50 though. Probably most governments still have them. Social security and health payments from governments probably go through Cobol code.

jamesfinlayson 5y ago

Not really - I used to work with a guy that had touched some COBOL at a previous job (not a bank) but that was it. I haven't worked a bank so I guess that's why I haven't crossed paths with one.

gassiss 5y ago

I've worked with at least 10 of them maintaining systems for a big insurance company

phoehne 5y ago

Yes. I had to learn to read COBOL using VSAM to port reports to a Cognos product and Oracle. One of the COBOL devs pulled me aside one day after we were happy to get one of the reports down to a few minutes. (I'll gladly admit that Cognos was a big part of the run-time cost). He ran the legacy report on the mainframe and it took well under a second. Not saying that mainframes are better but I felt like we'd actually wasted our time polishing a turd (Cognos) instead of doing something useful.

cafard 5y ago
Cognos! I remember looking in amazement at the SQL generated by Cognos.

cafard 5y ago

Several, yes, but at this point the ones I know are all retired.