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Java is nearly 20 years old. Do people really think if you're 45 you worked in Cobol?
by waterlesscloud 13y ago
Java is nearly 20 years old.
Do people really think if you're 45 you worked in Cobol?
- Jare 13y agoI'm 42 and I did, working part-time at a bank during college. For 3 days, at least. Then I designed a DSL and wrote a C tool to generate the COBOL programs from templates and DSL files. Then my boss decided to never again let me near the mainframe and bank accounting systems. But many of my coworkers spent 3+ years entirely on COBOL.
- nikatwork 13y agoI work in finance. We are teaching plenty of fresh-faced graduate recruit devs COBOL.
- rbanffy 13y agoFor someone into retrocomputing (who even made a 327x-ish terminal font), being paid to learn COBOL is weirdly interesting.
- nikatwork 13y agoMost of the org's original COBOL programmers are retirement age. So there's 60yo greybeards teaching COBOL to 20yos. It's a weird time to be a mainframer. If you are an experienced specialist you can charge insane hourly rates. At the same time, some bigger orgs have started transitioning off the old stack because all the experts keep dying or retiring. At some point mainframe specialist skills will go from insanely valuable to completely worthless.
- rbanffy 13y agoNever worked with COBOL, but did a lot of FORTRAN 77 in school. Some days I feel like I'll code high-persistence phosphor simulation into Compiz...
- bdunbar 13y agoI am 46. I was trained - Marines - in COBOL. Although after I left Quantico they put me in a billet working with dBase III, I could just as easily been assigned to a billet at a RASC where I would have been using COBOL.
- garysweaver 13y agoIn the late 1990s, I remember people there being recruitment efforts to find people with very little coding experience, teach them COBOL, and have them search for and fix Y2K bugs in COBOL code. I actually thought about doing that at the time, but ended up getting into Java. Even now, there is a lot of more COBOL out there that you'd think.