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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:23PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:23PM (#769848)

    BUZY, thank you for playing dumb.

    Hardware is not out of date, if the cost of operations and size of business match.

    I have today systemms that I wrote in 80's still running on hardware from the 90's. This computer I am writing this on is 17yrs old.

    It is only people that cannot think the problem through that are destroying our industry. Getting "slave" labour from oversees to do the wrong that they do not understand, but is is modern language! BLOWING FART NOISES.

    DEo you even realized the money you are paying out to get that 32GB laptop to be just as fast as the one that was 4GB 12 years ago. That is crap of the OS bloat and children that cannot write real code. So next we will save the world with "AI". The code word for more $$$$ for less responsive programs.

    Here's a question: How many of you have written code that:
    1) a response time of 1/4 sec
    2) running on machine with:
        A) 1MB of RAM
        B) Processor that is ~286 but 8bit...
        C) 40MB hard drive
        D) ISAM indexing - single index per file
    3) All the while:
          A) supporting 72 users
          B) processing 100 Million dollars a day of revenue

    then lets talk about modern machines.

    Then lets tak

  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:45AM

    by Bot (3902) on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:45AM (#769940) Journal

    1 fucking megabyte of RAM? 40 MB HD? whatever you needed to do, run a corporation?

    MDC mode ON
    I wrote a blackjack app for the casio pb 100 which had 544 memory locations (I am not sure it was 8 bit) for both data and a basic BASIC interpreter.
    I bought the 16kb expansion for the commodore vic 20 so i could play pacman on it.
    MDC mode OFF

    --
    Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:32PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:32PM (#770110) Journal

    I have today systemms that I wrote in 80's still running on hardware from the 90's. This computer I am writing this on is 17yrs old.

    I am sorry for you about both of those things.

    I have had legacy systems that lived much longer than I would have ever dreamed. A system I was designing in the early 80's had to have Y2K fixes. But that was near the end of its life as we were moving people to the 2nd generation system which was a desktop GUI. Then less than a decade later to web based systems.

    This computer I am writing this on is 17yrs old.

    So I guess your corporation doesn't have 3 year refresh cycle. (eg, new PC every 3 years.)

    On a side note: There was also a corporate program where you could buy your old PC for a MAXIMUM of $75. What a sweet deal. Now the deal is that you can have the old PC for free, but without the hard drives which must be removed and turned in for destructification. Some bonded company that has a big nasty shredder.

    So in about eight months, I will get another PC. My previous two were: Intel core i7, 4 cores / 8 thread, 32 GB ram, 1 or more TB HD, 256 GB SSD, support for 2 monitors. That's the standard R&D config. Windows 10 Enterprise, with Hyper-V. I don't know what my next OS will be. My previous OS was Windows 7 Enterprise. I get choice of laptop or mini tower -- I always take the mini tower for the better specs. Monitors are replaced whenever I have asked. I've never had any resistance to a monitor replacement.

    They seem to have figured out that there is actual business value in people having decent equipment. With VMs you can try bold things that you might not otherwise try. Practice things long before those kind of changes hit production.

    While I despise Windows, (1) they are paying for it, (2) I am not responsible for maintaining it, (3) the CIT seems very competent at managing a fleet of thousands, (4) since I work in Java, my product would just as easily run on Linux, and I have tested and proven this just to show it can be done.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:15AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:15AM (#770353) Homepage Journal

    That wasn't me you were replying to. We went to a lot of trouble to put those little + and - buttons on every comment and you still make the same mistakes? Way to make us feel unappreciated.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.