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from the portents-of-future-ecma-script dept.
The Enterprises Project writes about how the demand for several very specific, established skills, including COBOL, is increasing as boomers retire, taking their knowledge with them. Part of the skill gap between the old and the new is familiarity with the work flow and business processes.
Baby Boomers are retiring and taking with them the skills to run legacy technologies upon which organizations still (amazingly) rely – from AS/400 wrangling to COBOL development. That leaves many CIOs in a tight spot, trying to fill roles that not only require specialized knowledge no longer being taught but that most IT professionals agree also have limited long-term prospects. "Specific skill sets associated with mainframes, DB2 and Oracle, for example, are complex and require years of training, and can be challenging to find in young talent," says Graig Paglieri, president of Randstad Technologies.
Apparently, COBOL is still in use in 9 percent of businesses, mainly in finance and government. And so the demand for COBOL is gradually growing. If one has interest to pick up that plus one or more of the other legacy technologies, on top of something newer and trendier, there should be a possibility to clean up before the last of these jobs moves to India.
Earlier on SN:
Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 (2017)
Banks Should Let Ancient Programming Language COBOL Die (2017)
Honesty in Employment Ads (2016)
3 Open Source Projects for Modern COBOL Development
(2015)
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:59PM (3 children)
I did say ongoing since the late 90s, Mr ikanreed :)
That is exactly what happened with a huge enterprise application, written entirely in a higher level business database language, that I had been responsible for. Upper management was constantly dancing around saying that any day now they would officially launch a project to rewrite the entire thing in damn Java. And they were always sure the project would never take more than one year. That was the buzzword, and every manager wanted to be on top of it. They didn't even have the first clue what the application was or why it was written the way it was. Using any kind of C style programming language would have increased the complexity at least 100 fold. When I left there in 2008 they were still planning to re-write it "any day now", although by then the winds had shifted towards Microsoft's Dot Nut. Given the size and lack of documented requirements, if they had really started back in 2000 they might just be finishing it up about now. Just in time to be re-written in something else!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:06PM
The rewrite per se is not the problem.
The problem is management not committing up front to a couple or few years of expensive work.
Project management failure, not tech failure, from the sound of it.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:37PM
*is the sole dev in obscure language that no one knows for an extensive project*
*there's no documentation which explains the functions of the application*
"This is company's fault"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:32PM
I would dare say those winds have shifted back again.
Of course, I'm biased. But looking at just about any measure of programming language questions, activity, jobs sites, etc would give you the impression of which way the winds are blowing today.
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