
Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You - jkuria
https://www.wsj.com/articles/do-you-know-cobol-if-so-there-might-be-a-job-for-you-1537550913
======
guitarbill
> The problem is that Cobol isn’t popular with new programmers.

Enough with the COBOL shortage myth. Don't be fooled, not being popular is not
the problem. The problem is COBOL jobs aren't competitive, they often even pay
worse than other tech jobs. That's why they are either being outsourced or
offered to 60 year olds in their spare time. (So arguably they're not that
mission-critical, either.)

But then who is writing articles with a false premise and why? Why would a
news outlet (and I use that term loosely) even feature an article that
ostensibly is to get more programmers to do COBOL cheaper? I don't even
understand the agenda here - is there some kind of meta-game? The best I can
think of is they're hedging their bets for when a bank fucks up, but even that
seems pathetic. Maybe it's just COBOL turns out to be great clickbait for
programmers.

~~~
tumetab1
The answer to why would news paper would run a bad story usually is just
selling ADs.

Usually you see more of this on non-mainstream topics or stories that don't
get much traction because there will be no backlash.

~~~
crdoconnor
Uh, usually it's hastily reprinted press releases and journalists with a tight
deadline.

In this case it's almost too obvious whom the press release was sent out on
behalf of ("Cobol Cowboys").

~~~
waynecochran
I looked it up. "Cobol Cowboys" is a thing.
[http://cobolcowboys.com](http://cobolcowboys.com) "Not their first rodeo" \--
hilarious.

------
justin66
There have been enough of these stories over the years that literally the only
item of interest is likely to be the author's bio:

 _Max Colchester is a U.K. banking correspondent for the WSJ in London.
Previously WSJ correspondent in Paris covering fashion, nuclear energy and
politics. He is @MaximColch on Twitter._

So the main thing is, the author - because of his background - likely has no
idea that this is a recurring theme over decades, that the world nevertheless
hasn't run out of COBOL programmers, and that it's an IT job companies today
are as likely to outsource to the lowest bidder as any other job (whether
that's a good idea or not).

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exabrial
I _could_ learn COBOL; I've had to take classes in my undergrad and one of my
careers involved it. There's a couple of reasons why I dont:

* Putting my career on a trajectory where I am using a dying technology. Unless it paid 3x-5x what I could make using a JVM language (my current career path), the risk/reward isn't there. So market forces will need to drive the cost of salaries up even farther before I consider a jump.

* Outdated development methodologies. My experience with COBOL so far is a lot of entrenched practices that we later learned are inefficient. Both tools and management have been extraordinarily reluctant to improvement and change. I'm not willing to undertake the additional stress to deal with PITA, so until the management over these ares is forced into retirement, companies will endure a shortage of fresh talent.

~~~
jeremy_wiebe
I made the explicit choice to avoid the COBOL trajectory in 2001 when I
graduated from college. At the time the place I graduated from was working
hard to graduate people with skills for the local industry (which was cobol,
jcl, rpgIII, etc)

I don’t blame the college. But it was a choice and for me it was a good one.

------
SuperPaintMan
Another issue with COBOL (Apart from being unsexy and verbose) is simply
getting access to a proper mainframe environment. You could pick up COBBOL
using something like GNU Cobol or similar but it's working in the z/OS
environment that is needed and understanding the various system facilities and
how they interact. MTM is pretty much one of the only ways to get access to a
recent version of z/OS to test on (the other being shelling out 2K/yr for IBM
LMS access).

In a age when most things come with snazzy oneliners and docker images trying
to learn COBOL is an esoteric endevour. The language has its warts and quirks,
but it's nothing too crazy. Same with TSO and learning JCL, it's orthogonal to
the current landscape.

(Not saying I wouldn't love to be doing in here in Canada)

Fun fact: The current version of IBM Cobol has JSON GENERATE and JSON PARSE,
so you can whip up endpoints that interact directly with a mainframe (as long
as your convert the code page at the network boundary). Never thought I'd be
able to use React and Cobol backed by DB2 in 2018.

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hugg
Replying to the title here, but from my experience knowing how to program
COBOL was only one small part of the problem at my previous employer. Knowing
what the programs where doing and what other programs the output affected
mattered much more. Such knowledge was not set in documentation but rather in
people's heads, more often than not that knowledge disappeared as soon as the
person that had been working in that part of the system retired.

~~~
RickJWagner
Yes, I agree.

It's the business knowledge that really matters. I think this is true no
matter what languages and toolsets are used-- in the end, it turns out to be
the surrounding information that's of value.

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raincom
Well, Indian offshore companies have been training many COBOL guys since Y2K.
These days, most of the SAP related jobs are outsourced to India. How can one
expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master COBOL now?

How about salaries?

~~~
toyg
_> How can one expect that the same fate won't befall those who want to master
<insert any language here>_

FTFY.

No programming language requires proximity. The only jobs you can expect to
never be offshored are in (literal) plumbing.

This said, anything involved with Very Big Companies is probably more at risk,
because it makes more sense for them to move entire departments offshore just
to save a few percentage points on aggregate costs (actual productivity be
damned). So I expect this will soon happen to the likes of Salesforce, if it's
not already. AWS is definitely already happening.

Also anything getting too mainstream, because then it makes sense for
outsourcers to invest in training high numbers of people. I expect the market
to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers, now that it's making real inroads in
the enterprise space (with bigdata etc).

~~~
paganel
> AWS is definitely already happening.

Can confirm, I live in the capital city of an Eastern European country and
I've been approached by a AWS recruiter a couple of months ago, she told me
they were about to open a big new office in here. I think they were quite
desperate to get their share of hirings because they had approached me even
though there was no mention on my LinkedIn profile of C++ or Java, which was a
major part of the job requirements.

> I expect the market to soon be flooded by Python outsourcers,

Fortunately or not there aren't that many Python programmers out here to speak
of (I'm talking about Eastern Europe, maybe things in India and South-East
Asia are different). I should know, because I've been programming Python for a
living for 13 years now and the market for Python programmers isn't a large
one. Yeah, I did ok, as in there are small shops that pay decent money for
Python programmers, and from time to time there's even a big outsourcing
company desperate to hire Python programmers because a new foreign client has
arrived with a Python project on their doorsteps, but more often than not
Python is still looked as a "scripting language" and as a "programming
language for non-important and non-enterprisey stuff".

Just recently a friend of mine that used to work for a major outsourcer based
in this area (they have big Western clients, you probably interact with some
of their code each day) told me that their company puts people like Python
programmers that they intend to hire on a special list (and probably Ruby
programmers, too), as in they're not seen as long-term employees, more like
project-based (see the part above about Python projects coming from foreign
clients), as the focus is mostly on Java and probably some C# and C++, but
mostly Java.

------
wiz21c
Another thing is that the mainframe vendors use their locking to get a lot of
money. So some companies want to leave that, except they can't because the
business logic written in COBOL works well. Therefore, the company let most of
its COBOL workforce go, keep some old guys to maintain programs and divert
investment to other platforms. When the old maintenance crew will be dying,
businesses will have had time to move out of the mainframe. That's what I see
at a few government agencies in my country : COBOL is still alive, but it's
just slowly dying and nobody invest in it anymore. And the jobs associated to
it are labelled as "maintenance", good luck getting a pay rise.

Tips : Oracle feels the same, we're moving to Posgtresql wherever possible. So
my career path is basically set : Java will stay on top because there's no
language that is better in my segment (batch processing, long lived code, just
a hell of a business logic, thousands of rules) and Oracle will be pushed out
by in place replacement like postgres. I'm gonna die in an open source world
:-)

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neonate
[http://archive.is/21BnV](http://archive.is/21BnV)

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mbrumlow
I really dislike slotting things down to a language. If you are proficient in
the underlying programming concepts, the language simply does not matter with
the right amount of motivation.

~~~
bovermyer
So someone with a strong competency in C#, PHP, or JavaScript should be able
to write Assembly?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I feel like there's a piece there that's
missing.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Why not? With training, of course, and time to ramp up.

Assembly isn't Linear A.

~~~
tclancy
How can you be sure?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Of which part? That a programmer can learn another language, or that Linear A
isn't just an obscure programming language written down with stick on clay
bricks?

------
commandlinefan
> There might be a job for you

That pays just over minimum wage.

------
chrisbennet
I’m not seeing salaries...

~~~
wglb
ProTip: not likely to be very high.

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sbr464
I’m curious why there aren’t more x -> x conversion/adapter tools available.
Most languages have the same core data models/abstract concepts, if there
really is an enterprise/business demand for a product, usually some company
would come up with a solution. Personally I’m curious about COBOL and learning
from it’s design, but I’m intrigued by this question in general.

~~~
bitfhacker
Hi! First post on here.

The conversion/adapter tools exists. It's not a technical issue.

The problem is that cobol applications are normally monolithic, and a
migration to another system represents an huge risk because: 1) you migrate
like a Big Bang migration, or; 2) you migrate step by step.

Imagine a bank with applications running at 30 or 40 years without problems...
Nobody in his perfect judgment will accept to have a Big Bang migration. The
risk is too high.

For migrating step by step, you must have a good bussiness case (it must
compensate the risk), opportunity (you must be able to keep working in the
Bussiness As Usual) and you must have the right people (people that have the
knowledge in organization). If you don't have this three things it will be
very hard to migrate Cobol to another language/platform.

Usually Cobol is used in mainframe, so the right aproach (with less risk) IMHO
is to migrate first COBOL from z/os to a Cobol in another platform
(windows/*nux whatever), and then migrate Cobol gradually to another language.

~~~
rectang
There can also be an intermediate phase of migrating from a hardware mainframe
to a virtualized mainframe. I understand that's what TicketMaster did a while
ago.

> _Hi! First post on here._

Welcome, and very nice post. :)

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RickJWagner
I'm glad to hear about the freelance gigs for COBOL coders.

I started with COBOL. If the freelance gigs continue on, maybe I'll wind down
my career with a little part-time, once-in-a-while COBOL work.

It might just be nostalgia, but I miss that environment a little bit.

------
MatthewWilkes
I can't tell if this is in the article as it's paywalled, but a company in
York recently put up an advert for £20k/year for Cobol programmers with no
programming experience required, doubling at the end of the training period.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Is that a livable wage there?

~~~
barry-cotter
£400 a week, in York? Hell yes. £800 once you’re done training for someone who
couldn’t program before they started is not just good, it’s fantastic for
anywhere in the U.K. outside London for a junior.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Thanks! I don't know anything about York, and am honestly not even sure what
the £:$ conversion is at the moment.

(Being paid to learn a skill from scratch does sound pretty objectively good,
though.)

~~~
PNT510
I think the conversion is somewhere around 1 pound to 1.30 in dollars. So 26k
for training and 52k afterwards.

~~~
nappy-doo
Forget India. People should outsource to the UK.

~~~
pavel_lishin
People absolutely are - one of my previous employers moved a large development
team to Belfast, and another team has a team in Dublin (not the UK, but
presumably their rates aren't too wildly different.)

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sigzero
How and where to learn COBOL?

