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Been doing COBOL for the past five years, so it's been my main thing since leaving school. A on of insurance companies, banks, telcos, airlines and old governm
by tapland 3y ago
Been doing COBOL for the past five years, so it's been my main thing since leaving school.
A on of insurance companies, banks, telcos, airlines and old government systems for anything related to healthcare and taxes still use it and it's not all IBM Mainframes. I think IKEA just recently migrated away from it but a lot of companies with old inventory systems still do use COBOL.
The language is easy, systems and products gigantic, your mentors write their code (incl. Java) in a 55x132 char terminal and sometimes there is even more than absolutely no documentation!
It's fun but I'll probably want to do something more modern for a while before maybe returning to the old systems.
For anyone interested to learn, I've recommended think Jan Sądek's mainframe playground before ( https://mainframeplayground.neocities.org/ https://mainframeplayground.neocities.org/ ).
Keep an eye on IBM's "Master the Mainframe" and hobbyist licenses for OpenVMS. I found setting up GnuCOBOL in a nice way was too much of a hassle to recommend.
- sgt 3y ago> Jan Sądek Random question. Will that weird looking 'a' render on a mainframe? EBCDIC?
- le-mark 3y agoThere are several different “national” variations of ebcdic as well as double byte encodings. IBM was all about selling, and their customers had deep pockets.
- hyperman1 3y agoThis is actually one of the reasons why COBOL is deep legacy: The code pages systems only works well if everybody stays in their country.
- Hnus 3y agoWhats the salary in comparison to lets say full-stack webdev.
- ecshafer 3y agoFWIW when I worked in a Finance company with a lot of Cobol + JCL + DB2 devs (including in management so I could see more info) their salaries were on average similar to Full Stack but possibly lower, especially as we put more AWS emphasis which those people started getting more premium salaries. Some banks I hear give cobol premium but it seems to be more specifically very specific mainframe systems experience + cobol.
- akavi 3y agoBut what do those Full Stack engineers make? Salaries are hugely variable across the industry. There are “senior” engineers making 60 k$/yr, and new grads starting at 200 k$/yr
- ecshafer 3y agoI would say $100k-$175k would be the average range depending on seniority, including bonuses and such.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- breakfastduck 3y agoA lot of these kind of skills arent always applicable or comparable to a salary position. Many do odd contract jobs that are extremely high value; i.e. come in a fix this super big bug or add this super important feature on a COBOL system at an extremely high day rate because its hard to find people with appropriate skills.
- tapland 3y agoGenerally lower, like other devs in the kind of giant organization that has mainframes.