The Plight Of Cobol Mainframe Programmers

[dvarapala]

Since there are a couple of you here...

[Mick]

Ain't nobody got time for dat!

I did some COBOL programming in High School and College. The last time I offered my services to try to do maintenance on some COBOL code, the folks managing the applications laughed at me.

Then they spent 9 figures having all of their applications re-coded.

[ZipZap]

They told me "that's what business uses", so I ran away like a mofo.

Programmed spacecraft with Fortran77

[Frankie the Fink]

I've written 10s if not 100s of thousands of lines of COBOL code; I had dreams about it during Y2K when I remediated huge programs for the SEC.... Its not a career growth path and being a maintainer of a software base of legacy business systems is as exciting as being a night guard at a Burger King. I had to fire a couple of programmers that didn't want to do anything but DBase-III - 20 years after it was no longer mainstream.

A lot of nonsense in that video, COBOL is not some mysterious language, you can't figure out. I taught it to myself in a Navy project in the 80's and delivered several mission-critical systems using it in a few monhts.

[Datawiz]

COBOL, Fortran, Basic, Assembly, I've done it all. Regardless of the language that one chooses to code in, the amazing thing is the thought process doesn't change. Even better, DATA hasn't changed in 30 years.

I got trapped in some older school technologies as the web came to life (Delphi and SQL Server), but I reinvented myself and emerged on the other side with great success. At the end of the day, evolve or die.

[Frankie the Fink]

Originally Posted by Datawiz

COBOL, Fortran, Basic, Assembly, I've done it all. Regardless of the language that one chooses to code in, the amazing thing is the thought process doesn't change. Even better, DATA hasn't changed in 30 years.

I got trapped in some older school technologies as the web came to life (Delphi and SQL Server), but I reinvented myself and emerged on the other side with great success. At the end of the day, evolve or die.

The storage of DATA has damned sure changed, maybe you aren't old enough to remember when there was only hierarchical databases before some smart people used E.F. Codd's relational rules to usher in a new era of technology.

I will agree, logical-thinking, methodical programmers will be successful regardless of programming languages.

[Datawiz]

Originally Posted by Frankie the Fink

The storage of DATA has damned sure changed, maybe you aren't old enough to remember when there was only hierarchical databases before some smart people used E.F. Codd's relational rules to usher in a new era of technology.

I will agree, logical-thinking, methodical programmers will be successful regardless of programming languages.

Regarding data, I'm both before and after of relational databases. I've seen it all, and coded it all.

And it's still evolving with no SQL data, and big data, but in general, data in today's world still follows the relational database paradigm.

[Raazor]

Gay

[GixxerBill RIP]

Originally Posted by Datawiz

I got trapped in some older school technologies as the web came to life (Delphi and SQL Server), but I reinvented myself and emerged on the other side with great success. At the end of the day, evolve or die.

Agreed, you either keep up with technology or get left behind in the dust very quickly. Calling yourself a "Cobol Programmer" nowadays is the equivalent to a "Quadrajet Expert"

[Mick]

Originally Posted by ZipZap

They told me "that's what business uses", so I ran away like a mofo.

Programmed spacecraft with Fortran77

When I was in high school, they taught 3 languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, and Pascal. I was mostly a FORTRAN guy, which was good because when I got to Engineering school, literally EVERYTHING I did in college was FORTRAN based.

I went out of my way to keep my COBOL skills going in college for the same reason, they told me EVERYTHING in business would be COBOL based. I don't remember ever using it in the engineering world I entered out of college. If it wasn't FORTRAN, it was some kind of variant of BASIC, which I had learned about in high school from dicking around with it with friends.

It was the early 2000s when my company found itself in need of COBOL programmers to work on maintenance of our financial software that ran a $5 billion company. There was no talking to management about it, they knew a shit load more about it than the several guys like me who saw the handwriting on the wall. Five years later, they were paying through the nose for developers in India that didn't understand our business at all for code modifications to keep pace with changing accounting rules, as well as NOT being truly competent in the language, so lots of mistakes were happening regularly. The next step was the pain and expense of buying a new "suite" of financial software that had to be heavily modified to address the intricacies of our business on an "emergency" basis.

The mis-management of the situation caused by senior executive's arrogant views and failure to recognize even the basics of the problem, cost our shareholders literally billions of dollars.

[Frankie the Fink]

All of the flight simulators I programmed at Oceana Naval Air Station were FORTRAN; I get real adept with it...

[GrandSportC3]

I've been doing Cobol for 32 years now. All our mainframe applications are scheduled for decommission. The one that I'm the Subject Matter Expert on will be fully migrated to server based this November. Hope to get laid off in the next couple of years and get my severance package.
It may still drag out 3 to 4 years..

[ZipZap]

Originally Posted by GrandSportC3

I've been doing Cobol for 32 years now. All our mainframe applications are scheduled for decommission. The one that I'm the Subject Matter Expert on will be fully migrated to server based this November. Hope to get laid off in the next couple of years and get my severance package.
It may still drag out 3 to 4 years..

Now it all makes sense...

[Yadkin]

Lowes store brand Cobalt tools are decent tools.

[NoOne]

I had to hire a Vax programmer...gold mine if you can still do it.

[GrandSportC3]

I had to take an IQ test for my 2nd Cobol job that I had. That was common practice back then.
I'm aware of the issues with periods in Cobol. When I took over the system. I eliminate all periods but one period per section and added all scope delimiters like END-IF.
This prevented the issue with missing periods or one too many periods. In 20 years in my current job, my code never caused any issues. Thar's why they kept me for 20 years.

[GrandSportC3]

It is critical to decommission those systems within the next 10 years as virtually all the Cobol programmers will be retired by then.

[ratflinger]

And I always thought that Cobol programmers were those guys on BSG that programmed the original Cylons. huh.

[A/E]

[A/E]