SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
We reached out to Daniel Döderlein, CEO of Auka, who has experience with working with banks on technological solutions such as mobile payments. According to him, COBOL-based systems still function properly but they're faced with a more human problem.
This extremely critical part of the economic infrastructure of the planet is run on a very old piece of technology — which in itself is fine — if it weren't for the fact that the people servicing that technology are a dying race.
And Döderlein literally means dying. Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language.
And here I thought everyone knew banking software should be written in PHP, javascript, or a combination of the two.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Aiwendil on Saturday April 29 2017, @10:17AM (4 children)
Another solution would be the groundbreaking notion of actually training people in the skills needed.
Over here (sweden) a bunch of banks and other companies joined together and simply paid a school to have COBOL-courses. (Also had the sideeffects of ither schools starting to offer it).
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmoschner on Saturday April 29 2017, @11:23AM (2 children)
American businesses are not going to spend money to train people. It would require thinking beyond the Quarterly profits. They also don't want to risk training people who are just going to jump ship for a better offer. This is yet another side effect of the erosion of company loyalty (companies are not loyal to employees who in turn have no loyalty to the companies...a vicious cycle).
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:47PM (1 child)
Companies will complain that schools aren't giving students the correct education, and they should offer classes on COBOL.
But come on, this is COBOL. It has the reputation of being an easy language, good for those who find BASIC too hard. Good programmers find it tiresomely redundant and verbose. The real difficulty isn't COBOL, it may be knowledge of the ancient computing environments of the 1960s. Maybe they still use punch cards, tapes, and actual IBM mainframes from that era, though I'd guess they emulate all they can. Even if it's all emulated, probably someone still needs to know arcane stuff like Job Control Language.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 30 2017, @04:22PM
Again, learning JCL does not require deep intellectual resources from a generally skilled programmer. Been there, done that, meh.
This problem is entirely self-inflicted on the part of the banks, and every entity that thinks college degrees constitute a sane pre-filter for employment on these kind of isolated technical issues, which by definition are extremely vertical and require only someone with those vertical skills. Not to mention requiring documented work experience for gratuitously simple skillsets. "What, you've never been employed as a pencil sharpener? I'm sorry, you don't qualify for our office work." Yes, I am comparing COBAL and JCL to pencil sharpening for any competent programmer.
I recommend getting some marshmallows, sitting back, and enjoying watching them burn consequent to their own stupidity.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday April 29 2017, @01:14PM
Not sure if more, or which, schools have done it so far but I know that KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden) offered courses where staff came from IBM (and from pulsen.se ) to teach Z\OS, JCL, COBOL and more or less everything mainframe related. Not sure if or how it turned out in the long run, it was a few years ago now. They where offered as evening classes. I took the once on Mainframe, Z\OS and Linux when I lived in Stockholm. They didn't offer COBOL at the time, it was a later edition. It was very interesting. But then I moved away from Stockholm and that is where the bulk of the jobs are unless you want to go to one of other big cities (or down to Bromölla).