4 ms·
> COBOL devs are a specialized niche these days and they get paid accordingly. In my experience the well paid COBOL devs are those with 20+ years of experience
by tapland 4y ago
> COBOL devs are a specialized niche these days and they get paid accordingly.
In my experience the well paid COBOL devs are those with 20+ years of experience, often in one specific system, often bumped by being re-hired a bunch of times for the same position.
I've been doing COBOL since 2018 and younger devs my age (late 20s, early 30s) with a few years of experience make decent money, but the average is bumped by the teams having a lot of devs near retirement age.
If you want to learn:
The language isn't very complicated. I'd recommend grabbing the Visual Cobol for Windows trial just to get coding (and then shunning anything MicroFocus when you are done ;) )
https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overview https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...
If you want to/will end up tinkering with IBM systems, check out Jan Sądek's Mainframe Playground: https://mainframeplayground.neocities.org/ https://mainframeplayground.neocities.org/
For running COBOL on VMS, comp.os.vms is a common place to hang out https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms?pli=1 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.vms?pli=1
A dev named Remy documented his first steps on OpenVMS and it was a great help when starting out: https://raymii.org/s/tags/vms.html https://raymii.org/s/tags/vms.html
There is some actual training material from firms specializing in COBOL training floating around, but they are mostly IBM and/or MicroFocus documentation with some suggested example programs.
I hope the resources above are useful and good luck!
- jandrese 4y agoOf course the COBOL community is on Usenet. It's so obvious in retrospect.
- dingosity 4y agoYes. COBOL and Usenet are both simple tools that just work and are unlikely to be used by Facebook.
- goodpoint 4y agoWith the difference that COBOL is clunky and unpleasant while Usenet works very well and it's lightweight.
- dingosity 4y agoCOBOL does well at what it is designed to do. Don't write an operating system in COBOL. Don't write business logic in Assembly Language or C. Or not. It's a free world. Do what you want. But the purpose of COBOL isn't to show off your hot coding chops. No No. That's why ${DEITY} invented Lisp. COBOL is intended to clearly communicate how data is to be processed for business applications. And it does that reasonably well.
- dehrmann 4y ago> the well paid COBOL devs are those with 20+ years of experience, often in one specific system... There's essentially only one employer they're worth that much to.
- moomoo11 4y agoWhat is “well paid” if you don’t mind? Any range you can provide?
- tapland 4y agoAnything resembling senior developer salaries.
- foobarbaz33 4y agoThis question needs a hard numbers answer. In some cases well paid can mean breaking $1 million. In other geographical areas or domains a well paid senior is $150k. The range of well paid is so wide it's not even worth mentioning without a number.
- dontbenebby 4y ago>20+ years of experience, often in one specific system Is that experience in COBOL at that point, or more the quirks of the software, in the way I don't have 20 years of graphic design experience, I have more like 5ish paired with relearning the various changes to the UI, shortcuts, and extra features that get added or shifted out to other apps?
- tapland 4y agoIt's COBOL in the sense that any manager in charge of hiring will be looking for someone who 'knows COBOL' and have no idea about what's actually valuable.