32 ms·
Yes, it's true. My dad works for a large credit card processor that runs a ton of COBOL and they have a really hard time finding people. The big problem those
by thr0wawayf00 4y ago
Yes, it's true. My dad works for a large credit card processor that runs a ton of COBOL and they have a really hard time finding people.
The big problem those guys are running into is that they aren't paying anywhere close to market rates for engineers working in more modern stacks. Senior developer pay tops out around $120k last I checked and they've been reliant on cheap offshore contractors for years now to insulate themselves from paying modern dev wages in the US.
Funny thing though, the contracting firms are now notifying these companies that they won't be supplying COBOL developers into the future because there's a lot more money to be made contracting out devs in modern stacks than COBOL. It doesn't get a ton of attention because nobody can see the future, but hearing my dad talk about his company makes me slightly concerned about the future of our digital payments infrastructure.
- breakfastduck 4y agoYeah its kinda scary. People meme it but so much of the modern world relies on an aging stock of retiree's to come in on contract and do a thing then leave to be sustainable. It's not the amount of stuff that runs COBOL thats a problem, it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society - I don't think that's an overstatement.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago> it's how critical that infrastructure is to human society Exactly, and the regression horror stories I hear are unbelievable because these codebases are so old. A while back, a major customer of this processor transmitted a payment reconciliation file that had bad headers in it and brought down the entire reconciliation system (billions of dollars a day flow through this platform). No basic input validation, no escape hatch for corrupted files, nothing. I couldn't believe it when I heard the story. The crazy part was how long it would take to harden the system against bad input like that because a lot of that code was written 20-30 years ago. People working in modern systems think they know tech debt...
- fredsmith219 4y agoYou are right. I started my career in COBOL and I know my way around a mainframe and openvms. When I looked into jobs, they were paying far less than I can make coding in Java, Javascript or C#. They won't pay a decent hourly, so they won't find people. We're out here, but won't take a pay cut.
- soco 4y agoThis is the same discussion as about lacking nurses or whatever "essential workers" which we don't want to pay yet miss them so dearly. And the solution is right there in front of our noses...