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IBM scrambles to find or train more COBOL programmers to help states:
The economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic have created a surge in demand for COBOL programmers. Last week, for example, the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to help fix problems with the software that runs the state's unemployment insurance system.
A new initiative from IBM seeks to connect states with experienced COBOL programmers—and to train a new generation of them.
"In the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, our clients are facing unprecedented circumstances," an IBM press release says. Some states "are in need of additional programming skills to make changes to COBOL—a language that has been widely reported to have an estimated 220 billion lines of code being actively used today."
A new online forum, co-sponsored by the Open Mainframe Project, aims to connect COBOL programmers to people wanting to hire them.
At least this time they're offering to pay.
Previously:
COBOL-Coding Volunteers Sought as Creaking Mainframes Slow New Jersey's Coronavirus Response
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @09:02AM (3 children)
It's been 40 years since I did COBOL back at University.
One thing I do know is when the MBA's want someone to do the time consuming detail work, it's a lot cheaper to wail about job opportunities, get 10 applicants chasing each seat, choose the cheapest, get the box ticked on the corporate agenda, then lay the blokes off, leaving them, along with many others, holding the bag for all the expenses they ran up chasing the employment opportunity.
If they are serious, they will pay not only for your training, and salary while training, otherwise, this is just the same ruse I have seen the men of the suit and tie pull on us over and over and over.
How many people in senior groups and homeless camps did this back in their day? Nobody wants to par for skills if they can fool them into paying through the nose to prepare themselves for a hopeful career.
Make the Executive who laid off his tech staff do the job. No one seems to appreciate how much tech skills are worth. Too many of us work for hope, while those who know their worth get paid. I know way too many people who have been chewed up by the system, a system which makes lots of money feeding on suckers who are too nice to do business the way businesses do business.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday April 14 2020, @05:07PM (2 children)
Ditto.
In the early days of the microcomputer revolution, people who could write solid working code were the stars of the show. They were the important people. Without them you didn't have a product. Sales, marketing, managers, were necessary, but something that only matters if you have a product to sell.
Small business owners understood this.
Over the decades developers became a cheap commodity. I first heard of this in the late 1980's. I was a lot younger than now, and the person telling me this was old enough to understand things. Microsoft, at that time, would simply burn out developers. Work them hard until they burn out. They're cheap to replace. Like spark plugs. I couldn't believe it. But he told me that over time this would be how it is done everywhere. And in hindsight, he's right.
It's like another person told me in about 1981. He was fairly old at that time. Head of the computer center at my school. He told me that COBOL would be around until and beyond 2000. I couldn't believe it. But he explained it was because of the sheer dollar value of all the existing code already written that cannot be easily rewritten just because technology changes. Of course, he was right. And I see that same thing in Java, which I view somewhat as a modern day COBOL, for that very reason. There's nothing (in the near future) that can motivate the cost of rewriting existing Java business code into something else.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 14 2020, @07:35PM (1 child)
if dumb whores would quit working for these scumbags they wouldn't get away with treating people like that.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:12PM
The problem is that they probably don't have the chops to get a good job. So they are happy to work for the scumbag who is unable to realize how bad a job they do. The scumbags pay them what they think they are worth because of their low quality of work. Thus other employers are encouraged to similarly underpay.
In 1979 I recognized the phenomena where lots of incoming freshmen thought that computer science was a way to get rich quick in the new gold rush. Problem is, while they could learn the most basic (pun intended) statements of a language, they could not put them together in any coherent sequence to accomplish even the simplest goal. Read the lines in this file, if the 3rd field is greater than 50 then print the first field.
Even in non freshmen there were amazing things. In assembler, on this one 24 bit machine, when you had a string, you would count the number of words that string occupies as every 3 characters is a word, plus any final one or two characters take an entire word. This one guy thought it was necessary to count the words taken up by comments in the assembler source code. Just no conception of what is actually going on.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.