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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:18PM (2 children)
Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a million dollars just to "fix" something that was still working?
Bonus points if your new solution doesn't work nearly as reliably or well as the old one!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:17PM
Are you in charge of our nation's highway infrastructure?
You use the same arguments they do to wait until an ancient bridge, for example, collapses before doing anything about maintenance.
"It's too important to fix!"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:04PM
Wrong question: Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a million dollars just to "fix" something that was still working?
Right question: Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a BILLION dollars because they DID NOT fix something that was hopelessly obsolete, not serviceable, maintained in a barely limping along state for years, all because it would have cost half a million dollars to fix?
Of course, I may not have the costs right. But once it blows up, and it will, the costs will very probably be much higher than the costs to have fixed it.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.