SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, @07:59PM (3 children)
You have a legacy system. You want to replace it with a new one.
All you need is an AI who that treats the old system like a black box and inserts all the combinations of possible inputs and detects all the corresponding results.
Now you teach the AI which ones are meaningful and which ones to discard and *ta-daaah* you have a new shining black box that do exactly what the old one was doing :D
CYA
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:50PM
Don't even joke about such things on a public forum...
Somewhere out there some PHB's weaselly nark employed to monitor sites such as this for ramblings of identifiable internal 'dissidents' may also be engaged in the noble art of climbing the corporate pole, and will suggest such a 'plausible sounding' scheme to the PHB and make it out to be 'all his own work...'
On second thoughts....
Forget what I said, as I'm out of the game it won't affect me, I'm screwed economically as it is, so as to any financial fallout..another bucket of piss poured on my head when I'm already swimming in the sewer wont make much of a difference.
I'll get the popcorn in now for the show then..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:25AM
That sounds too much like gathering requirements and specifications, so it'd never work.
But the hardware the current system runs on is probably already well spec'd (I hear that's how they used to do things.) so it's easier to just take that spec and emulate the old hardware and keep the old system running on in emulation forever ...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:52AM
> subject AI to COBOL systems
when skynet happens, it will be for self defense.
Account abandoned.