4 ms·
COBOL will guarantee your employment, but beware that anything written COBOL is going to be deeply corporate stuff. It will mean that it is hosted by a company
by d--b 2y ago
COBOL will guarantee your employment, but beware that anything written COBOL is going to be deeply corporate stuff. It will mean that it is hosted by a company that doesn't need nor want to change, or worse that it's reluctant to put any money into upgrading its infrastructure.
The reason people don't want to do it is because it's not fun at all. I once had a project where the client was a bank that needed some COBOL work done. They needed to make a few changes to a program that had been running for years. They gave me the program in printouts. Like I had 200 pages of COBOL to read. And the people working there were people who had been transfered here because they were not good. So they had no idea about what they were doing. The whole thing was extremely frustrating and we ended up dropping the project.
- dagw 2y agoCOBOL will guarantee your employment Only if you are a tiny handful of major financial centers or willing to drop everything and move to basically anywhere. If you are in a midsized city there is probably only 1 or 2 companies in need of COBOL developers and if they're not hiring you're screwed. I saw this happen to a friend of the family. He'd spent his entire 20 year career working as a mainframe and COBOL developer at the regional office of a Fortune 50 company in our home town. When he got let go, he literally could not find another job. There were plenty of programming jobs around, but not for someone who had spent their entire career programming COBOL.