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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
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)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:20PM (4 children)

    by donkeyhotay (2540) on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:20PM (#769659)

    There is far, far more than language proficiency involved here.

    I am reminded of a client we had where I worked back about 1990. Their company had an IBM System 36 and the code was written in RPG II. They had one system operator who was pretty good at running reports and making backups, etc. Our company charged about $100/hr for coding and their board of directors felt like that was too much. The ambitious and somewhat naive system operator told them that she thought she might be able to do the work if they would send her to a class to learn RPG. A local trade school was offering a class in RPG taught on a Burroughs mini computer. The company told us that they would not need our services any longer and the system operator proudly informed me that she was going to be a coder. I wished her luck.

    About three weeks later we got a call from the client: could we please come down and make some modifications? When I arrived the system operator got up out of her chair and theatrically knelt down and bowed to me. "Whatever they're paying you, it's worth it," she declared. She told me that after a week in class she confidently logged on her system to do her first programming assignment. It was at that point that she realized that she had no idea where the editor was or how to run it. Had no idea how to compile her code. Had no idea how to execute the program once compiled. She was completely lost.

    If you work on one of the older style systems, such as an AS/400 type system, you have to do it all. You not only have to be the coder, but you have to be the system administrator, the DBA, the UI designer. You have to know the odd, proprietary architecture. You have to know the quirky editor and how it works. You have to do a lot of your work on the command line. You have to know the commands and the CL scripting language. You have to know how the screen files work and how to integrate them into your programs. It's more than just a couple months worth of work.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:23PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:23PM (#769685) Homepage Journal

    All of which is a long way of saying she was not even remotely proficient at the job.

    That was then and this is now though. Nowadays you probably wouldn't have received a call at all. She could have found most any information she needed to know online, though it may have taken some time.

    Today I don't mind people using the Internet as a repository of seldom needed knowledge. It's pretty much all out there somewhere and it doesn't take much longer to look something up than it does to already know it. After using it enough times, they will already know it.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:54PM (#769780)

    I wasn't a coder but I worked on as/400 for 5 years and by the time I left I could write simple rpgle programs, I understood at least the basics of how screens work (maybe there are some advanced features I don't know). I wrote some CL programs at some point too but I've forgotten all of it by now. Heh WRKCFGSTS does.. uhm something.

    I'd argue that the point of these systems is that IBM takes over a lot of work for you. People from IBM would show up and replace parts, I guess automatically. Of course in the day of cloud hosting all this is very quaint and cute. I think owning an as/400 in 2018 is a sign that your top tech people don't like learning new things and the people above them are either extremely risk averse or out of touch.

    In the case of the company I worked at they're all sticking their heads in the ground while they depend on 2 elderly engineers to not die. One of who I can point to as the sole reason they've failed to migrate off the system in the 20 or so years that these things became a rarity. In the time I was there they wasted a small fortune upgrading their 400, as I started learning more and more about corporate development I'd ask him about things and he'd give me the unusual answer that "it was too complex, impossible" to simple questions like "Can we diagram the as/400's [not saying the name] workflow?"

    Since then I've come to understand that such situations are the result of poor engineering but personally I think he was lying because he enjoyed the dependent relationship that the 400 forced the entire enterprise to keep with him. He'll be dead within in 10 years and within a year of that something catastrophic will happen that would require his help by the end of that year. I think it's their wishful thinking that they're going to call in consultants from IBM to save them, it's what they do for their windows environment. But if the state of their 400 codebase is anything like their lead dev told me. Fat fucking chance.

    The 2000 employees of this company have been loyal as fuck all the while suffering indignities like 5 days of vacation a year and being told to stop going to the doctor so much because it's expensive. Getting constant false warnings of layoffs even as the company acquires 2 and 3 competitors at a time, all intended to get people to work harder and waste less.

    I will agree that you can't just take a community college class and be a dev. You might become a great programmer, but you're not taking anything over for awhile. You might be able to take someone like me who is a java dev and has some deeply repressed memories of as/400 and help prop up a REST facade so you can start chopping off parts of your shitball and roll it into little microservices.

    I would charge a fortune for such a headache though.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:04PM (#769839)

    1) the system was not at fault nor do you have to multi-hatted to work on S/36 or AS/400. This is crap that consultants want you to belive to keep the their billing high.

    Been on these machine from System/3 model 3 days. 45 years.

    What you have to have is the ability to think in logic processing steps... that is it.

    Try a simple example: Put a hot dog on the table of your kids. Now write-out the steps.

    If you wrote "get a the hot dog out of the refrigerator... BUZZY you lose" What is a hot dog and what is a refrigerator.

    Like I said simple steps.

    PS: programmers today are wasteful "kids". If you need to learn to write code in 12kB. Learn to think in steps that get strung together to do a real job in real time. PS: there are VERY few real programmers today. Damn DEVOPS and CODERS - there is no programmers.

  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:04AM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:04AM (#769926)

    If you work on one of the older style systems, such as an AS/400 type system, you have to do it all.

    Maybe. It was late 2000's when State Farm was still using AS/400 through all of their branch offices in the United States. I remember being hired because the branch office in question no longer had any terminals at all. Excuse me, they had ONE next to the AS/400, but it was barely working. They had a Windows 2000 Advanced Server with a special board in it that hooked up to the AS/400 with twinax. All of the terminals were Windows 95 machines running a special terminal emulator. It was really funny seeing the old terminal screen in a window next to Minesweeper :) Can't really remember all that much about it, except that all I really needed to do was to service the Windows server and replace the twinax card and configure it correctly again. I never actually touched the AS/400 part of the system.

    The real kicker was that it seemed entirely unsupported by State Farm I think, and the owner had purchased it himself so his employees could work on "real PCs", process PDFs and Word Docs, and still be able to tap into the AS/400 system that communicated with State Farm HQ. Otherwise, it would've been an IT guy coming out from corporate to fix it.

    I thought it was surreal myself, but not as surreal as it still being used in damn near 2019.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.