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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, @09:54PM
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.