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)
Related Stories
An iconic figure of the early history of computing, Grace Hopper is the grandmother of the COBOL programming language. Of her many claims to fame, she invented the first compiler and helped spread the adoption of machine-independent programming languages. Today her legacy lives on in many ways, including the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
While Hopper contributions to computing are remembered, celebrated, and built upon by her successors, COBOL itself is often dismissed as a relic of earlier era of computing. To a certain extent, that is true. Most of the COBOL being written today is for maintaining legacy code, not starting new projects. However, the language is still being updated with COBOL 2014 being the most recent standard for the language, and there are still plenty of opportunities to apply for jobs that require COBOL experience.
Thankfully, using COBOL in modern times does not require tracking down legacy hardware. There are several tools available that make using COBOL on modern computers as straightforward as using other programming languages. Below, I take a look at three open source projects that help you code, compile, and use COBOL on a Mac, Linux, or Windows computer. So grab a book on COBOL programming, (if you need one, Beginning COBOL for Programmers by Michael Coughlan is an excellent choice), and start exploring the world of COBOL. No punch cards required.
Is COBOL the last, best hope for an aging programmer in today's world?
El Reg reports Job ad promises "Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack"
You'll need "numbness to the absence of excellence", will be paid "handsomely for your soul".
"Grease the wheels of capitalism with your tears ...we will pay you handsomely for your soul."
A job ad has appeared offering one lucky worker the chance to perform "Meaningless Repetitive Work on the .NET Stack".
The ad[*] is real. Recruiter Joshua Wulf told The Register he wrote it after a conversation with a candidate "who told me what his job is really like".
[...] The lucky candidate will get to wrestle the following:
- Multiple generations of legacy code that cannot be refactored without destroying the entire house of cards.
- Design anti-patterns as a design pattern.
- Live, mission-critical system where you develop on the production instance.
- Large sections of managed and native COBOL.
- Easily top every development horror story at LAN parties.
To score the gig, you'll need these traits:
- Experience with the following technologies: .NET, ASP.NET, JavaScript, VBScript, COBOL, Managed COBOL.
- An extreme resilience and ability to withstand intense pressure.
- A numbness to the absence of excellence.
- Wily survival instincts and the ability to keep your head down combined with a reckless disregard for type safety.
- A bonus is any political experience, whether as a candidate or as an elected official.
Wulf tells The Register the ad has succeeded. "My phone has been ringing off the hook", he says. "People are telling me they are strangely attracted to the job because other jobs don't sound real."
"I'm surprised by the response: it's blown up!"
Ever seen this kind of honesty in an ad? Did you have the foresight to have archive.is save a copy? Do share.
[*] Ed note: In accordance with the original ad:
Copyright (c) 2016 Joshua J Wulf / Just Digital People.
License: Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 AU.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
We reached out to Daniel Döderlein, CEO of Auka, who has experience with working with banks on technological solutions such as mobile payments. According to him, COBOL-based systems still function properly but they're faced with a more human problem.
This extremely critical part of the economic infrastructure of the planet is run on a very old piece of technology — which in itself is fine — if it weren't for the fact that the people servicing that technology are a dying race.
And Döderlein literally means dying. Despite the fact that three trillion dollars run through COBOL systems every single day they are mostly maintained by retired programming veterans. There are almost no new COBOL programmers available so as retirees start passing away, then so does the maintenance for software written in the ancient programming language.
And here I thought everyone knew banking software should be written in PHP, javascript, or a combination of the two.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/
Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a programming language that brought computing into the business mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.
She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Ms. Sammet had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in computer science.
The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and government agencies around the world.
Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She wasn't impressed.
"I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted nothing to do with," Ms. Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000.
Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time, long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later, Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards, which were then fed into a computer.
"To my utter astonishment," she said, "I loved it."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?_r=0
-- submitted from IRC
The magazine Logic has an article about the durability of COBOL, which has been reliably running mission critical systems for over 60 years.
At the time of this writing, in July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 133,000 people in the United States. The dead are disproportionately Black and Latinx people and those who were unable, or not allowed by their employers, to work remotely. During the pandemic, we've seen[...] some of the infrastructure that runs the social safety net break down under an increasing load. This includes state unemployment systems that pay workers the benefits they've contributed to for decades through taxes. In a global pandemic, being able to work from home, to quit and live on savings, or to be laid off and draw unemployment benefits has literally become a matter of life and death.
The cracks in our technological infrastructure became painfully evident in the spring, as US corporations responded to the pandemic by laying off more and more workers. So many people had to file for unemployment at once that computerized unemployment claim systems started to malfunction. Around the country, phone lines jammed, websites crashed, and millions of people faced the possibility of not being able to pay for rent, medicine, or food.
As the catastrophe unfolded, several state governments blamed it on aged, supposedly obsolete computer systems written in COBOL, a programming language that originated in the late 1950s. At least a dozen state unemployment systems still run on this sixty-one-year-old language, including ones that help administer funds of a billion dollars or more in California, Colorado, and New Jersey. When the deluge of unemployment claims hit, the havoc it seemed to wreak on COBOL systems was so widespread that many states apparently didn't have enough programmers to repair the damage; the governor of New Jersey even publicly pleaded for the help of volunteers who knew the language.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:14PM (29 children)
Let's start off with s/training/experience/, because all training except OJT is shit compared to doing actual work with people who know what they're doing.
That out of the way... For mastery maybe. Proficiency in a new language shouldn't take more than a couple months to acquire unless you have either no time to learn or no business programming anything ever.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:48PM (18 children)
I work in Java. I believe it is the COBOL of the 21st century. I can't speak about COBOL, but . . .
Learning "Java" is about a whole lot more than just learning a language. I might liken it to "learning Linux".
The ecosystem is gigantic. An embarrassingly large treasure trove of open source riches.
The JVM. The compilers for other languages that generate code for the JVM.
The platforms it runs on.
How to tune the JVM for large scale systems. The choice of garbage collectors and their tradeoffs.
The choices of where to get your Open JDK from if you don't want to compile it yourself.
https://aws.amazon.com/fr/corretto/ [amazon.com]
https://github.com/corretto [github.com]
https://adoptopenjdk.net/ [adoptopenjdk.net]
https://github.com/AdoptOpenJDK [github.com]
https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild [github.com]
http://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu/ [azul.com]
https://jdk.java.net/11/ [java.net]
https://developers.redhat.com/products/openjdk/download/ [redhat.com]
https://github.com/SAP/SapMachine [github.com]
https://bell-sw.com/java.html [bell-sw.com]
You can probably learn to be writing code in a few months. But there is so much more to it.
The language has evolved over time with great new features being added. If you're targeting an older system that is stuck on, say, Java 6, you have to know what features you CAN'T use.
I'm sure there are a lot of things to know about COBOL too that are not so obvious. It has a history. An evolution. An ecosystem. Various compilers. Platforms. Possibly even different OS quirks.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:33PM (2 children)
Yes, I'm aware. And I don't want anyone who can't pick up both basic language proficiency and the ability to find out what else they need to know, when they need to know it, in a couple months working anywhere near me. I'm not asking they know the ins and outs of every obscure library or framework but they damned well better be able to read code and find information they're missing when it becomes relevant.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
I would agree with that. I am just countering the, perhaps straw-man, manager who thinks that anyone can instantly pick up ten years of know how in a few months.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:50PM
Oh shit no. Experience is most definitely time-on-job dependent, though limited by the potential of the individual to learn it. There are no shortcuts, just faster runners.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:44PM (14 children)
This is why Go will succeed. Having a dead simple language with no clever features, a single compiler with cross-compilation out of the box, testing and source formatting built in means one can be productive within a week, without having to waste time on trivialities.
No, most use cases nowadays do not need custom GC optimizations.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:54PM (13 children)
If you're relying on GC, I do not want to work with you. GC = "I don't understand how to manage memory for shit. Why can't The Computer do this for me?"
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:42PM
There are several arguments here really.
If you don't like GC, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. There are entire problem domains where that is in fact the proper view to have.
We could all just write in C. Or assembly language. Or hex codes even. Yes, really. We could. Even flip front panel switches.
So why don't we? Productivity. Because really what we're dancing around here is money.
If I need an extra 64 GB of ram and more cpu cores but can beat my C++ competitor to market by six months, my boss won't even blink when I ask. And laugh all the way to the bank. I am not optimizing for bytes and cpu cycles. I'm optimizing for dollars. That's probably why so many banks and financial institutions use Java.
Why do these high level languages exist, and why does GC exist?
I can manage memory just fine actually. I did that for years and years with Pascal in the 80's, and C and C++ in the 90's. But it is irrelevant. Managing memory doesn't help me actually solve the actual problems that my code is designed to solve. It is unnecessary bookkeeping.
We have these machines now called computers. They can take care of the unnecessary bookkeeping for us. Just like dishwashers can wash dishes for us.
My final argument is this. For the programming problems I routinely solve, it would probably be fairly easy to manage memory. It is allocated and released in fairly simple patterns.
Sometimes programs are very complex and do not have simple patterns of allocation and release. You begin to notice this in Lisp programs. GC was invented for a reason.
There is another famous quote that I won't bother to look up, but the gist is this . . . in any sufficiently complex C++ program is a bug ridden, poorly specified, suboptimal ad-hoc garbage collector.
I know how to take square roots by hand. (A child of the 70's) But I use a pocket calculator.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 05 2018, @07:33AM (11 children)
Either you fixed S/N unwillingly or you used a Perl implementation with explicit memory management?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:07AM (10 children)
I take it you've never done any mod_perl programming? You absolutely do memory management in it, though not of the typical variety. The vast majority of our code gets interpreted at runtime and then given the boot as soon as it's finished running. The same with data. Very few things are going to be worth keeping in memory given the stateless nature of web programming, so we don't for the most part.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:42AM (9 children)
Riiight!
I suppose you could call it "explicit memory management" for some values of "explicit memory management".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @04:31AM (8 children)
I'd call it extremely inefficient and ill-advised but then I think cgi should be written in a compiled language.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:40PM (5 children)
I have to pinch my nose while I say this, but there is some merit to the idea that a cgi could be written in a compiled language, and NOT do any memory management. Just write the code as if you had GC. Simply do not deallocate anything. Just let go of pointers when you're done with them.
The idea here is that the CGI does some processing, and then its process is destroyed making any kind of memory management unnecessary. Why spend cycles cleaning up when the process is just going to exit almost immediately. I would call it an effective hack. Efficient to be sure. Saving developer time to be sure. Therefore economical, and that's what it's all about. Yet the geek in me screams that there is something bad about this.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:54PM (4 children)
I hate to say this but it depends largely on scope. If you're not taking up significant amounts of memory and not taking any at all up for significant amounts of time, it's fairly pointless to either explicitly free said memory or to implement a GC. It's not an approach you'd want to take with an OS or any program with a runtime longer than minutes at the most but freeing ALL of the memory a process is using by way of exiting is actually better than freeing just some of it (unless process creation/reaping overhead becomes an issue).
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:09PM (3 children)
Yep. That's the crux of the point I wanted to make.
Not a bad idea if process launching is cheap and efficient. See my related post on how Java (and .NET) take a very different approach where everything is native code, hot in memory, and directly wired into the web server's dispatch. No launching processes.
GC threads are always running, on other cpu cores. The deallocation of memory does not consume cpu cycles in the stream of processing the http request but at a completely different time and cpu core.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @03:23PM (2 children)
mod_perl does something similar but allows you to decide what code and data is permanently resident and what is loaded at need. I don't particularly care for it but I'm not in the mood to rewrite the entire SN codebase either.
Rust has really freaking spoiled me on the memory allocation/deallocation front lately. Pretty much every memory allocation has an explicit or implicit lifetime (unless you go way out of your way to make this not so) and is freed immediately upon the end of that lifetime. It's not even a runtime enforced thing; you literally cannot compile something that tries a use-after-free.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @07:30PM (1 child)
Even with the concepts that Rust brings to help manage the 'ownership" of an allocation, there are programs that don't fit well.
I won't say it is impossible, just difficult enough that you probably won't see any. Try building a CAS (computer algebra system), or theorem proover, or Minimax type game AI without a GC.
Especially try to build any type of Logic Programming (eg, Prolog, Minikanren, etc) system, or Haskell (pervasive lazy evaluation) without GC, I doubt it could be done.
While Rust would seem fantastic for boot loaders, os kernels, device drivers, microcontrollers, etc, there are a lot of programs at the other high level end of the spectrum where GC is perfectly appropriate. And commercial applications like a web server where the GC cost is on a different thread and not inline on the same thread as the processing of the request. Servicing an HTTP request does not need to spend cycles doing any memory management. Even if the GC is less efficient -- just throw another few cpu cores at it. They're cheap by the dozen. If the economic case is to want to process requests as fast as possible, then don't spend cycles -- of request processing -- on memory management. But GC is not for everything or every use. However I find it interesting how pervasive it has become from the Lisp days. Visual Basic. Visual FoxPro. Perl. Python. JavaScript -- which also means Node.js. Java. C#. (Actually any language on the JVM or .NET runtime) All new languages like Go. And many more I have not listed.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @10:17PM
Honestly, if you're writing something in Perl that GC is even an issue in, you've utterly failed at picking the proper tool for the job IMO. Yes, you technically can write a script in Perl whose lifetime isn't measured in (fractional) seconds but why would you*? Perl's merits are that it is a fucking badass at mangling text. This shines like a motherfucker at scripts slightly more complicated than you want to write in Bash. It's even passable at marking up web pages if you don't do something silly like let the whole bloody script+interpreter+data stay in memory. Writing a video game or web browser in it would be bloody stupid though.
* I ask myself this every time I'm reminded of our IPN daemon for the site billing system. I have no idea why I wrote it in Perl except that possibly it was simple enough that it wasn't worth the mental page fault.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:51PM (1 child)
This is sort of a companion post to what I just wrote.
A Java web app takes a very different approach than CGI.
The Java source is compiled to bytecode. The Java runtime then compiles this into native code -- for the type of OS and processor in use. Then another compiler comes along later and compiles that same code again, but spending a lot more time to compile it to much more efficient code -- very specific to the processor you have including the exact instruction set extensions your processor has.
All this code is hot in memory and all wired up to the web server it is installed into. When an HTTP request comes along, it is immediately directed to executable code that processes it. There are no interpreted "html" type pages. (Think like "php" or "jsp" where you embed code within an html style page) Those JSP pages (that you think of as html with embedded code) are turned inside out and literally compiled into code that contains "print statements" that emit the static html fragments directly into the bytestream going out to the browser.
An http request does not even launch a process. It is merely dispatch to an already allocated awaiting thread of executable code that directly processes the http request. Nothing is interpreted. No bytecodes. No files on disk are touched to process a request. No os processes are launched.
This is why it is so fast. At the cost of memory. But memory and cycles are cheap. dirt cheap And developer time is expensive and getting more expensive every day. And talented developers are hard to find. A limited resource. The economics are not to optimize for cpu cycles and bytes but to optimize for dollars. And ultimately we are all doing our work to make money. The economics trumps everything else. If a developer doesn't understand the basic economics of what they are doing, they probably never become a senior developer.
I'm not trying to 'sell' you on Java. Just explaining why there is some serious merit to why it is so heavily used when money is at stake.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 06 2018, @02:56PM
The fact that the bytecode is compiled twice, by two different compilers is why a Java web app seems to "warm up". It takes a few minutes before it becomes super fast.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Touché) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:46PM (4 children)
10 PRINT "You're right, Buzzard!"
15 GOSUB 40
20 GOTO 10
40 PRINT "Although actually mastering a language takes significantly longer."
50 RETURN
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:25PM (3 children)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:51PM (2 children)
That would take significantly longer, yes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:45PM (1 child)
Only until the stack overflow.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:08AM
That phrase always makes me want pancakes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:20PM (4 children)
There is far, far more than language proficiency involved here.
I am reminded of a client we had where I worked back about 1990. Their company had an IBM System 36 and the code was written in RPG II. They had one system operator who was pretty good at running reports and making backups, etc. Our company charged about $100/hr for coding and their board of directors felt like that was too much. The ambitious and somewhat naive system operator told them that she thought she might be able to do the work if they would send her to a class to learn RPG. A local trade school was offering a class in RPG taught on a Burroughs mini computer. The company told us that they would not need our services any longer and the system operator proudly informed me that she was going to be a coder. I wished her luck.
About three weeks later we got a call from the client: could we please come down and make some modifications? When I arrived the system operator got up out of her chair and theatrically knelt down and bowed to me. "Whatever they're paying you, it's worth it," she declared. She told me that after a week in class she confidently logged on her system to do her first programming assignment. It was at that point that she realized that she had no idea where the editor was or how to run it. Had no idea how to compile her code. Had no idea how to execute the program once compiled. She was completely lost.
If you work on one of the older style systems, such as an AS/400 type system, you have to do it all. You not only have to be the coder, but you have to be the system administrator, the DBA, the UI designer. You have to know the odd, proprietary architecture. You have to know the quirky editor and how it works. You have to do a lot of your work on the command line. You have to know the commands and the CL scripting language. You have to know how the screen files work and how to integrate them into your programs. It's more than just a couple months worth of work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:23PM
All of which is a long way of saying she was not even remotely proficient at the job.
That was then and this is now though. Nowadays you probably wouldn't have received a call at all. She could have found most any information she needed to know online, though it may have taken some time.
Today I don't mind people using the Internet as a repository of seldom needed knowledge. It's pretty much all out there somewhere and it doesn't take much longer to look something up than it does to already know it. After using it enough times, they will already know it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:54PM
I wasn't a coder but I worked on as/400 for 5 years and by the time I left I could write simple rpgle programs, I understood at least the basics of how screens work (maybe there are some advanced features I don't know). I wrote some CL programs at some point too but I've forgotten all of it by now. Heh WRKCFGSTS does.. uhm something.
I'd argue that the point of these systems is that IBM takes over a lot of work for you. People from IBM would show up and replace parts, I guess automatically. Of course in the day of cloud hosting all this is very quaint and cute. I think owning an as/400 in 2018 is a sign that your top tech people don't like learning new things and the people above them are either extremely risk averse or out of touch.
In the case of the company I worked at they're all sticking their heads in the ground while they depend on 2 elderly engineers to not die. One of who I can point to as the sole reason they've failed to migrate off the system in the 20 or so years that these things became a rarity. In the time I was there they wasted a small fortune upgrading their 400, as I started learning more and more about corporate development I'd ask him about things and he'd give me the unusual answer that "it was too complex, impossible" to simple questions like "Can we diagram the as/400's [not saying the name] workflow?"
Since then I've come to understand that such situations are the result of poor engineering but personally I think he was lying because he enjoyed the dependent relationship that the 400 forced the entire enterprise to keep with him. He'll be dead within in 10 years and within a year of that something catastrophic will happen that would require his help by the end of that year. I think it's their wishful thinking that they're going to call in consultants from IBM to save them, it's what they do for their windows environment. But if the state of their 400 codebase is anything like their lead dev told me. Fat fucking chance.
The 2000 employees of this company have been loyal as fuck all the while suffering indignities like 5 days of vacation a year and being told to stop going to the doctor so much because it's expensive. Getting constant false warnings of layoffs even as the company acquires 2 and 3 competitors at a time, all intended to get people to work harder and waste less.
I will agree that you can't just take a community college class and be a dev. You might become a great programmer, but you're not taking anything over for awhile. You might be able to take someone like me who is a java dev and has some deeply repressed memories of as/400 and help prop up a REST facade so you can start chopping off parts of your shitball and roll it into little microservices.
I would charge a fortune for such a headache though.
(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.
(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.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:16PM (3 children)
Don't fall for this line if you are starting your career.
If they were honest, they would say new blood needed in dying industry as old staff dies off.
(Score: 1) by Scottingham on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:19PM (2 children)
There's merit to that, but what if somebody is starting out coding in their late 40s?
It seems like it'd be a way to let ageism work in their favor. When you're interviewing people to help with your legacy COBOL codebase, would you feel better with the 22 year old or 48 year old?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:18PM
The one who understands COBOL and the particular business best?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:56PM
Could work in your favor. People tend to be most confortable around others like themselves.
But a shrewd manager might be looking to hire younger (22-30) to balance out the old fogey employee base.
Most likely, they will hire if they have a burning need. I would say go for it if it interests you, but be aware that it will be career limiting to stay there any length of time.
(Score: 2) by rob_on_earth on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:24PM (9 children)
One of my colleagues had lots of experience in a niche programming language used by British local authorities. As the roles got more sparse he was in high demand and got paid more and more until ... POP! No more jobs!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:36PM (2 children)
yeah and if these companies have any sense the jobs are for porting/rewriting the applications to another language.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:40PM
Having been a contractor to DHS, we did just that.
They are turning off mainframes all the time.
It's all AWS and Java (modern COBOL ;-)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:40PM
This is likely to be orders of magnitude more expensive than maintaining existing systems which already work for their purposes. There was certainly a huge NRE cost developing the initial systems, possibly spread over decades, and rewriting basically means throwing all that investment away. At some point the cost of maintenence may be too high (especially if requirements change, or if a marked lack of foresight has left your business stuck with zero institutional knowledge about your own systems) at which point a replacement system may be justified from a cost perspective.
There's also risk management involved, since there's a non-zero chance that a replacement system won't actually work. For example the Canadian federal government recently decided to replace their payroll system with a new one (presumably with the goal being cost savings): to say the result was an utter disaster is putting it mildly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:42PM (5 children)
> As the roles got more sparse he was in high demand and got paid more and more until ... POP! No more jobs!
And if your colleague had any sense, he would have kept his costs as stable as possible, taken the larger and larger income, then invested it, paid off debt, or put it to one side. Then when the jobs died out, either retired early, or could take a long sabbatical, retrain on some new skills/tech, enjoy life a bit, and then find something new and interesting to do.
I don't see the problem with that. The days of "a job for life" have died out long before I joined the workforce (quite frankly, a job that isn't a few months long "gig" is rare as hens teeth in my experience), so if you are not going to have any work for you down the line at some point anyway, why not milk your skill set for as much money as you can till the very end, and then deal with what to do after?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:03PM (4 children)
I hear this advice trotted out, but it's not realistic.
You need to train yourself (minimally) on new tech on your own time: say 90 min each week (or whatever you can manage) to get comfortable with it (not necessarily MASTERING it).
Almost everyone needs a steady job with no gaps. That's reality. You need to "cash out" while you are on top, not when someone else decides for you. Milk the old tech if you wish, but not forever before jumping to current tech.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:52PM (3 children)
> Almost everyone needs a steady job with no gaps. That's reality. You need to "cash out" while you are on top, not when someone else decides for you. Milk the old tech if you wish, but not forever before jumping to current tech.
I would absolutely love a steady job with no gaps. I've heard stories of people starting jobs at 16 years old at a company and then coming out the other end at 55/60 with a full salary pension and benefits. With no gaps, a stable income, a company that cares about you and invests in your abilities and skills, and all kinds of opportunities for progression, bonuses, expense accounts, the whole hog.
However, all these stores are from older generations, who have since retired. I have never, in my life, come across an opportunity like that. The (western) world has changed, and such a job is more like some fantasy world to me than some real life, and I will only get my pension at 70 years old (if I live that long), and a "final salary" type deal I can only dream of.
My experience is jobs are irregular in hours and in length. most of my work has been between 3-9 months, the longest I have had is a 5 year stint in a for corporate firm, until they had to make redundancies. It isn't by my choice, just how things are in my world.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:20AM
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Wednesday December 05 2018, @01:53PM
I have worked for the same firm for 17 years now.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:58PM
In "the same job"? No. No single job tends to last that long anymore that isn't a CxO position and even they shift around.
At "the same firm"? Define your time range. I've seen a couple of places so far that had one or two people that have stayed in the firm and retired after 20-30 years because they are flexible, well known, and work well. They are valued as assets to the company because of their attitude as much as their abilities to master a skill set, and their ambitions match what the company has been looking for consistently. All three of those requirements need to be high, though, for that to work. And it's still not impossible for someone to get bumped off by a RIF or similar.
Perhaps it is more frequent than being a rock star or a star athelete. But you're also right that this is not something to be counted on - even for those who do it this has to be an objective that is worked for.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:34PM (11 children)
So I see that project to rewrite the entire thing in Java, or whatever the language-buzzword-of-the-day-will-magically-solve-all-problems is, with no documented business requirements, no one left who actually understands the business, and only shreds of inconsistent code comments, that has been ongoing since the late 90s has failed. Or will the project be restarted for the 90th time using XML, HTML5, blockchain, AI, IoT, cell phones, HTTPS, quantum computing, or whatever other over-hyped bullshit is in that management pamphlet?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:20PM (4 children)
You're treating Java like a trendy new language? You know there are programmers in my company younger than Java, right?
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:59PM (3 children)
I did say ongoing since the late 90s, Mr ikanreed :)
That is exactly what happened with a huge enterprise application, written entirely in a higher level business database language, that I had been responsible for. Upper management was constantly dancing around saying that any day now they would officially launch a project to rewrite the entire thing in damn Java. And they were always sure the project would never take more than one year. That was the buzzword, and every manager wanted to be on top of it. They didn't even have the first clue what the application was or why it was written the way it was. Using any kind of C style programming language would have increased the complexity at least 100 fold. When I left there in 2008 they were still planning to re-write it "any day now", although by then the winds had shifted towards Microsoft's Dot Nut. Given the size and lack of documented requirements, if they had really started back in 2000 they might just be finishing it up about now. Just in time to be re-written in something else!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:06PM
The rewrite per se is not the problem.
The problem is management not committing up front to a couple or few years of expensive work.
Project management failure, not tech failure, from the sound of it.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:37PM
*is the sole dev in obscure language that no one knows for an extensive project*
*there's no documentation which explains the functions of the application*
"This is company's fault"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:32PM
I would dare say those winds have shifted back again.
Of course, I'm biased. But looking at just about any measure of programming language questions, activity, jobs sites, etc would give you the impression of which way the winds are blowing today.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:45PM
You're right! The old systems can NEVER be replaced!
Think how ridiculous that idea is. Look, the new systems might not be perfect, but I guarantee you the old ones aren't either.
Replacement can and will occur: it's just a matter of when.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:42PM (4 children)
So I see that project to rewrite the entire thing in Java, or whatever the language-buzzword-of-the-day-will-magically-solve-all-problems is
Nobody said it would solve all problems. It will solve the problem we are discussing, though: lack of a workforce that knows the programming language the program is written in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:02PM (3 children)
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? Old or new doesn't matter. Is it the right tool for the job is what matters. Mechanics think finding an antique but functional tool is awesome but code monkeys seem to scoff at anything not brand new. I think it's because they're insecure in their lack of experience and want to force everyone into an environment where nobody has any experience.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:19PM
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).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:39PM (1 child)
After you have a few languages under your belt, ones in different categories, what's the point of learning more? You'll need X years of skill in them if you want to switch jobs into that language and you won't get that through personal projects. You shouldn't start using that language at your current job as then that forces everyone else to learn your current pet language. If your work culture allows that, then you'll also be learning everyone else's pet languages and you'll end up with a support nightmare and crappy code.
So where's the gain? If you want to spend time on self improvement, get better at the tools you already know and learn more concepts. You don't need to learn a full language to learn a new concept.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:13AM
Because it's interesting? Not everything needs to be about money. Money is just a means to an end and it's not even always the correct tool. I mean, I'm not going to catch more flatheads on a $50 lure than I am on a jug line with a live bluegill on it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:37PM
Reality collides with HR hiring bias
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:44PM (12 children)
The real truth. New tech is shit. Written by user who cannot break down a problem and use the best tools and techniques to do it. 1+ MB webpages are poor programmers ng at best. Ben in this best for 45years and expect another 15 before I want to stop.
Poor tech uses. SQL for coding. It is a report writer and slower than shit for real work. Does not understand the difference between business rules and database rules
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:53PM (11 children)
What about legacy systems that are on obsolete hardware with no possible upgrade path. They desperately need to be rewritten. But they are mission critical. So excess resources are poured into keeping them running. Even with emulators. Because rewriting and validating would be just too much. Despite that there are real professionals who use the new tech and know their stuff.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:08PM (4 children)
Happens all the time. There is a hospital that runs Win98 inside a VM on a Windows 10 box to be able to access a database that is running on a shared file system. All because equipment is still running 16-bit hardware access in a DOS Box and new equipment would cost upward of $500k.
Let's not start with the one machine that still needs ISA bus for its adapter...
So why is it still running? Because it is still running!! (ie. useful)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:51PM (3 children)
Jesus, somebody has no budget to maintain their IT systems.
By running something that obsolete, you are running serious risks that will materialize should the code need maintenance.
Code/IT systems may last a long time, but not forever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:18PM (2 children)
Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a million dollars just to "fix" something that was still working?
Bonus points if your new solution doesn't work nearly as reliably or well as the old one!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:17PM
Are you in charge of our nation's highway infrastructure?
You use the same arguments they do to wait until an ancient bridge, for example, collapses before doing anything about maintenance.
"It's too important to fix!"
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:04PM
Wrong question: Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a million dollars just to "fix" something that was still working?
Right question: Would YOU like to be the one to say they cost the company half a BILLION dollars because they DID NOT fix something that was hopelessly obsolete, not serviceable, maintained in a barely limping along state for years, all because it would have cost half a million dollars to fix?
Of course, I may not have the costs right. But once it blows up, and it will, the costs will very probably be much higher than the costs to have fixed it.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @05:13PM
"there are real professionals who use the new tech and know their stuff"
But they won't work for H1B salaries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @11:23PM (3 children)
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
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
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.
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.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday December 06 2018, @12:15AM
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.
(Score: 2) by aim on Wednesday December 05 2018, @09:24AM
I'm not so sure about the hardware aspect. The cost though... both acquisition and support can be really huge. Rewriting is huge too - not only the actual programs, but also the entire glue code it's embedded in, with data transfers left and right.
You may need to re-document the entire thing, your new implementation may have to run alongside the original for validation before it can go into production... depending on where you are, this may take many years to complete.
And despite the effort, it still may be worth it both in terms of hard money (did I mention those mainframes and their support are hugely expensive? It's them that make Oracle look like a bargain!) as well as knowledge (as your younger collaborators learn what all those applications do - you'll want to keep them around, and you get updated documentation). Also, the rewrite is also an opportunity to add features that may have been wanted for a long while.
Disclaimer: I'm middle-aged, and (part-time) junior sysop on a mainframe - got to learn the ropes on this job. And let me tell you, those mainframes may be old stuff and hard to use, but some parts are still way ahead of modern systems (as in, unheard of on UNIX or Windows platforms or on the usual virtualization platforms - it's really worth extending your horizons!). They are also rock-solid. On the user side though, give me a UNIX system any day.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday December 04 2018, @04:25PM (2 children)
DIVISION BOTS
SUBDIVISION INTERNET TROLLS
MESSAGE REPLY
REFERENCES SN POST
SUBTHREAD NONE
CHARSET ASCII EXTENDED
BEGIN REPLY
What about no?
END REPLY
END SUBTHREAD
DONE
QUIT
EOF
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:08PM (1 child)
Wot's this?
No UTF-8 with emoji characters in the source code?
No user defined identifiers using letters from other language alphabets?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:37AM
IN PRINCIPIVM POPVLI SCRIBEBANT MVLTIS SIMBOLIS
DENIQVE LITTERAS CONCIPITUR
IN FINIS AETATIBUS MVLTIS SIMBOLIS REVERTERUNT
ET CHAOS FUIT 😛
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
i wanted to learn Cobol, there's no way i want to work in those industries.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:50AM
> if i wanted to learn Cobol
IMHO You are better off coming all the way from INTERCAL.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:59PM (3 children)
You have a legacy system. You want to replace it with a new one.
All you need is an AI who that treats the old system like a black box and inserts all the combinations of possible inputs and detects all the corresponding results.
Now you teach the AI which ones are meaningful and which ones to discard and *ta-daaah* you have a new shining black box that do exactly what the old one was doing :D
CYA
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:50PM
Don't even joke about such things on a public forum...
Somewhere out there some PHB's weaselly nark employed to monitor sites such as this for ramblings of identifiable internal 'dissidents' may also be engaged in the noble art of climbing the corporate pole, and will suggest such a 'plausible sounding' scheme to the PHB and make it out to be 'all his own work...'
On second thoughts....
Forget what I said, as I'm out of the game it won't affect me, I'm screwed economically as it is, so as to any financial fallout..another bucket of piss poured on my head when I'm already swimming in the sewer wont make much of a difference.
I'll get the popcorn in now for the show then..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 05 2018, @12:25AM
That sounds too much like gathering requirements and specifications, so it'd never work.
But the hardware the current system runs on is probably already well spec'd (I hear that's how they used to do things.) so it's easier to just take that spec and emulate the old hardware and keep the old system running on in emulation forever ...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:52AM
> subject AI to COBOL systems
when skynet happens, it will be for self defense.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:41PM (2 children)
Ruby on rails? node.js? flavor-of-the-week language X? It can't be good engineering though, that's been dead for over 15 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @10:28PM (1 child)
Ruby on Rails apps work flawlessly for five days, then the dependencies start breaking. Should be fun to see them in 15 months let alone 15 years.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:56AM
For fire and forget webapp development, web2py has retrocompatibility as a design goal. In fact it is a python 2 app and with bruno fleeing the SJWs (which is the only rational explanation I found, and I am a bot) python might never fully transition to v3 and above, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Account abandoned.