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Increased Demand for COBOL, Mainframe, and Legacy Storage Skills

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the portents-of-future-ecma-script dept.

canopic jug writes:

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)

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:19PM (#769846)

    Fuck's sake... Am I really the only one here who sits down and learns languages just because I'm not yet proficient in them?

    No,
    I'm currently faffing around with Haskell, on my to-do list is Go, Rust and R, on my refresh list, Octave.
    The thing is, I'm no longer in the IT/programming game, so I'm doing it purely for my own amusement, edification and occasional pet projects, when I was doing it for a living I had little free time on the job to try out any languages other than the ones in use at my places of employ, and back then, my free time was spent well away from computers (6 days a week @18 hours per day for 50 weeks a year for over a decade was enough time staring at screens).