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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: 2) by edIII on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:04AM
Maybe. It was late 2000's when State Farm was still using AS/400 through all of their branch offices in the United States. I remember being hired because the branch office in question no longer had any terminals at all. Excuse me, they had ONE next to the AS/400, but it was barely working. They had a Windows 2000 Advanced Server with a special board in it that hooked up to the AS/400 with twinax. All of the terminals were Windows 95 machines running a special terminal emulator. It was really funny seeing the old terminal screen in a window next to Minesweeper :) Can't really remember all that much about it, except that all I really needed to do was to service the Windows server and replace the twinax card and configure it correctly again. I never actually touched the AS/400 part of the system.
The real kicker was that it seemed entirely unsupported by State Farm I think, and the owner had purchased it himself so his employees could work on "real PCs", process PDFs and Word Docs, and still be able to tap into the AS/400 system that communicated with State Farm HQ. Otherwise, it would've been an IT guy coming out from corporate to fix it.
I thought it was surreal myself, but not as surreal as it still being used in damn near 2019.
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