4 ms·

My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting p

My mother spent much of her career as a COBOL programmer, dating back to the early 80s. She retired in 2015 and quickly got bored. I talked her into accepting part-time contract work, something to keep her busy. She got flooded by recruiters. They all told her the same story: "Big Corp" is nervous because a critical system runs COBOL and the staff that used to support it have all either retired or died. She decided against taking any contract work, telling me that once she retired, a switch flipped in her head - she could never go back to work, not for all the money in the world. Good for you, mom.

markus_zhang 5y ago
I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.
- Zababa 5y ago
  They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Good point. Maybe new developer salary is different from what contractors get? The number I see for contractors are pretty good but yeah they have decades of experience under their belt.
  - jimt1234 5y ago
    The contract offers my mother received involved good money, but that was actually part of the problem. She got the impression that most of the managers at "Big Corp" had little/no regard for these "critical" systems; they were just looking to save their own jobs, either by way of a miracle worker (wave a magic wand and fix 40 years of tech debt in 3 months) or a fall guy (it's the contractor's fault, not mine). Also, COBOL work is kinda crap. Debugging 20-year-old Java code sucks, but a 40-year-old COBOL project, with source code backed up to 5-inch floppy disks - forget about it. (I just watched the trailer for 'The Many Saints of Newark'. LOL)
    - catmanjan 5y ago
      It needs to be breathtaking money to be worth it when you take into account the risk of investing in a shrinking skill set
      - markus_zhang 5y ago
        I think it depends. On my side, I'm OK with a modest salary if it's stable for the next 10-20 years. I think mainframe fits perfectly. It's declining but not that fast. It's unattractive so you face little competition. It's just a hell lot hard to get in in the middle of your life.
        Zababa 5y ago
        You can get that with a regular developer job with the threat of your job being a dead end.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dagw 5y ago
  They are. The largest bank here in Sweden for example offers a 6 month free COBOL Academy to newly graduated students, that ends in basically a guaranteed job. I guess there just aren't enough takers.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    That's very good. I never saw these in Montreal. Maybe because I'm not a new graduate.
  - foobaby 5y ago
    That would be difficult to pull off in the US because full-time COBOL gigs just don't pay as much as modern software engineering jobs do. A lot of these big companies with legacy COBOL systems got way too comfy with offshore contractors and now big contracting firms aren't guaranteeing theirlabor pools like they used to because they can make a lot more money placing contractors in Java/Python/AWS/etc roles instead of COBOL. Training programs like this would have to pay incredibly well to keep people (which is not a bad thing for the workforce generally), but it's clear that some of these companies are used to paying far lower salaries and now they're running out of options while maintaining critical IT infrastructure in some cases.
- cyberCleve 5y ago
  I would imagine part of the reason is because even if you have a trained COBOL maintainer, they still have to learn and understand the actual business logic of the application. Learning the language is not even half the battle. Maintaining old often undocumented code is a hard task in any language.
  - notimrelakatos 5y ago
    Indeed, I've once met someone who migrated a COBOL project to Java, the biggest complain wasn't even the Language itself, but extracting business logic from a 40-year old spaghetti codebase. Sometimes bugs where part of the business logic itself and other developers who consumed the monstrosity had to make corrections on their side.
- mathgorges 5y ago
  I originally got into mainframe tech through IBM's annual Master the Mainframe program [1] which got me limited access real mainframe on some college's campus and IBMs manuals. The old -- and likely not so bad -- advice if you'd like to learn how to use a Mainframe is: Get access to a one, get a copy of latest Red Book [2], and start playing around :) [1]: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore (this isn't the program I went through, but my old bookmark now redirects here) [2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html (IBMs mainframe Technical Guides traditionally have a red cover)
- FpUser 5y ago
  When my friend immigrated to Canada he quickly realized that one of the fastest ways to make decent money (he is not an entrepreneur) is in IT. Being very intelligent guy he decided that there should not be too much of a problem for him to learn programming. To my surprise out of various areas he had chosen to do COBOL stuff. Long story short - he has very secure employment, not the top but very nice salary and zero worries.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Smart guy :P
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  Pay me a lot of money and I’ll do it. I think they all want to pay like 5 figures though.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    It seems to be all the same story. People talk about these huge pays and guaranteed jobs but the average developer is already getting a huge pay and has no problems finding work. The pays for COBOL do not even look that compelling and you are walking down a dead end when these systems finally modernize. I wouldn't touch cobol for anything short of $300k and the promise of enough work that I could retire within a few years.
- gopalv 5y ago
  > I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them They don't have enough work to train them on and whatever they have is actually critical enough to need someone experienced. My partner was hired to be a COBOL programmer right out of college in 2004 & trained to work on AS/400s. The problem was that everything was a small part of a big project, but you got no experience building a big project over its lifetime to see how it should be done. And on top of it, a lot of things which were "the right way" in 1991 wasn't so great in 2005. So a lot of work was actually bringing the existing work to code before you could do the tiny bit of work which is actually needed.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
What’d she do to get over the boredom? Did she end up taking a different kind of job?

markus_zhang 5y ago

I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them. I'm sure not everyone is interested in new techs. I for one is very interested in these "boring" techs but it's pretty difficult to train myself on these stuffs.

Zababa 5y ago
They don't pay enough. That's the issue. If COBOL paid as much or better for the average developer than Java, there would be no shortage of COBOL developers.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Good point. Maybe new developer salary is different from what contractors get? The number I see for contractors are pretty good but yeah they have decades of experience under their belt.
- jimt1234 5y ago
  The contract offers my mother received involved good money, but that was actually part of the problem. She got the impression that most of the managers at "Big Corp" had little/no regard for these "critical" systems; they were just looking to save their own jobs, either by way of a miracle worker (wave a magic wand and fix 40 years of tech debt in 3 months) or a fall guy (it's the contractor's fault, not mine). Also, COBOL work is kinda crap. Debugging 20-year-old Java code sucks, but a 40-year-old COBOL project, with source code backed up to 5-inch floppy disks - forget about it. (I just watched the trailer for 'The Many Saints of Newark'. LOL)
  - catmanjan 5y ago
    It needs to be breathtaking money to be worth it when you take into account the risk of investing in a shrinking skill set
    - markus_zhang 5y ago
      I think it depends. On my side, I'm OK with a modest salary if it's stable for the next 10-20 years. I think mainframe fits perfectly. It's declining but not that fast. It's unattractive so you face little competition. It's just a hell lot hard to get in in the middle of your life.
      - Zababa 5y ago
        You can get that with a regular developer job with the threat of your job being a dead end.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dagw 5y ago
They are. The largest bank here in Sweden for example offers a 6 month free COBOL Academy to newly graduated students, that ends in basically a guaranteed job. I guess there just aren't enough takers.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  That's very good. I never saw these in Montreal. Maybe because I'm not a new graduate.
- foobaby 5y ago
  That would be difficult to pull off in the US because full-time COBOL gigs just don't pay as much as modern software engineering jobs do. A lot of these big companies with legacy COBOL systems got way too comfy with offshore contractors and now big contracting firms aren't guaranteeing theirlabor pools like they used to because they can make a lot more money placing contractors in Java/Python/AWS/etc roles instead of COBOL. Training programs like this would have to pay incredibly well to keep people (which is not a bad thing for the workforce generally), but it's clear that some of these companies are used to paying far lower salaries and now they're running out of options while maintaining critical IT infrastructure in some cases.
cyberCleve 5y ago
I would imagine part of the reason is because even if you have a trained COBOL maintainer, they still have to learn and understand the actual business logic of the application. Learning the language is not even half the battle. Maintaining old often undocumented code is a hard task in any language.
- notimrelakatos 5y ago
  Indeed, I've once met someone who migrated a COBOL project to Java, the biggest complain wasn't even the Language itself, but extracting business logic from a 40-year old spaghetti codebase. Sometimes bugs where part of the business logic itself and other developers who consumed the monstrosity had to make corrections on their side.
mathgorges 5y ago
I originally got into mainframe tech through IBM's annual Master the Mainframe program [1] which got me limited access real mainframe on some college's campus and IBMs manuals. The old -- and likely not so bad -- advice if you'd like to learn how to use a Mainframe is: Get access to a one, get a copy of latest Red Book [2], and start playing around :) [1]: https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore (this isn't the program I went through, but my old bookmark now redirects here) [2]: https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248852.html (IBMs mainframe Technical Guides traditionally have a red cover)
FpUser 5y ago
When my friend immigrated to Canada he quickly realized that one of the fastest ways to make decent money (he is not an entrepreneur) is in IT. Being very intelligent guy he decided that there should not be too much of a problem for him to learn programming. To my surprise out of various areas he had chosen to do COBOL stuff. Long story short - he has very secure employment, not the top but very nice salary and zero worries.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Smart guy :P
nsxwolf 5y ago
Pay me a lot of money and I’ll do it. I think they all want to pay like 5 figures though.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  It seems to be all the same story. People talk about these huge pays and guaranteed jobs but the average developer is already getting a huge pay and has no problems finding work. The pays for COBOL do not even look that compelling and you are walking down a dead end when these systems finally modernize. I wouldn't touch cobol for anything short of $300k and the promise of enough work that I could retire within a few years.
gopalv 5y ago
> I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them They don't have enough work to train them on and whatever they have is actually critical enough to need someone experienced. My partner was hired to be a COBOL programmer right out of college in 2004 & trained to work on AS/400s. The problem was that everything was a small part of a big project, but you got no experience building a big project over its lifetime to see how it should be done. And on top of it, a lot of things which were "the right way" in 1991 wasn't so great in 2005. So a lot of work was actually bringing the existing work to code before you could do the tiny bit of work which is actually needed.

MuffinFlavored 5y ago

What’d she do to get over the boredom? Did she end up taking a different kind of job?