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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, @11:04PM
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.