Battle of the Ages; Stereotypes Collide

JCOTTON writes "A CIO.com article By Phil Murphy explains that "The hype around the shortage of qualified legacy technologists grows each day. Pundits would have us believe that 1.5 million COBOL programmers will suddenly disappear one day, leaving any company with legacy technology in dire straits. The truth is that there are far more programmers with legacy skills looking for work than there are jobs for them, as evidenced by organizations like Legacy Reserves, which functions as a training and job matching service for unemployed or underemployed programmers wishing to modernize their skills." This article explains many of the issues facing "the upper half" of Information Technology workers."

Comments

So much for keeping up on VB6...

[parvenu74]

And here I thought there was going to be a great need for VB6 and that I would be viable for the next 20 years on that alone... Time to learn the new language of the month, I suppose.

Re:So much for keeping up on VB6...

[stupidfoo]

Time to learn the new language of the month

what is it this month?

Ruby? C#?

Or are we back to Java again? I had the month by month list, but I lost it.

Re:So much for keeping up on VB6...

[Anonymous Coward]

Language of the month is Python in December (so you can meet those end-of-year deadlines) or possibly Ruby (if you're attracted by shiny things), and Perl in January (because of my perpetual New Year Resolution - "This year I will learn Perl" - usually abandoned by February when I can't remember %'s from @'s)

Re:So much for keeping up on VB6...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we're about do for a holiday bash

Re:So much for keeping up on VB6...

[arodland]

% is the symbol for corpses/food in nethack and various other games. So just imagine that it's corned beef, and all will make sense.

Learning Cobol

[MikeBabcock]

I just searched Google for Learn Cobol and only got 417k results. Not that popular a subject anymore I suppose.

Re:Learning Cobol

[WIAKywbfatw]

Heh. "Elect an idiot" only got me 107,000 hits. I guess it's just not as fashionable a topic as it was, say, a month ago.

COBOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

In South Korea, only old people code in COBOL...

Hmm...

[which way is up]

They have been predicting the demise of programmers since the invention of COBOL in the 60s. It was supposed to turn ordinary business users into programmers thanks to its easy, English-like syntax. We're still waiting. Now this writer is talking about running out of programmers capable of maintaining code that was presumably easy to write and maintain?

Re:McFossil.

[Ayaress]

Actually, no they're not. At least not around here. I called a couple weeks ago. They're actually cutting jobs from the drivethrough. Pretty sad when McDonalds is laying off workers.

Of course it's a coincidence.

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Of course it's a complete coincidence that when the story mentions COBOL, the /. fortune cookie I get says "VMS must die.".

IT workers make tons of money

[CrazyJim1]

Thus sayeth IT technical college.

You don't need more than 417k

[Uptown Joe]

to run Cobol.

Unemployed PL1 Programmers are Unemployed Too

[Lucas Membrane]

Sally Struthers is going to be on TV asking for money for aged COBOL weenies, and I learned PL1 when I heard that it was going to replace COBOL and Fortran. So, think of poor me -- almost forty years dealing with people who didn't know that COBOL was inferior, and all I've got to look forward to is 40 years having a hard time getting charity because I've got a disease that doesn't have a Sally Struthers, Mary Tyler Moore, or Jerry Lewis. I may have to start drinking and get depressed so that Jason Robards and Terry Bradshaw will be on my side.

It sucks being a legacy programmer.

[muntumbomoklik]

I'm -still- trying to find a job with my Turtle Logo skills.....

Re:It sucks being a legacy programmer.

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Learn Visual Basic. It is at the same level of sophistication.

COBOL is easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

I learnt is in school years ago, in 1990, a simple program looks like this:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO WORLD.
AUTHOR. ANONYMOUS COWARD.
DATA DIVISION.
WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
77 DAUBE PIC X(11) VALUE "HELLO WORLD!"
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DEBUT SECTION.

1. PRINT DAUBE.
2. 
   STOP RUN
   

Tabulations was hard in cobol...
Also for old cobol program there was no COMPUTE statement, you had to do something like:
ADD A TO B GIVING C.
later it was
COMPUTE C=A+B.
easier :)

COBOL Dominion Theology

[Tackhead]

> Pundits would have us believe that 1.5 million COBOL programmers will suddenly disappear one day, leaving any company with legacy technology in dire straits

Sounds like the Rapture to me.

For Root himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the BOFH, and the trump of Root: and those buried face-down, 9-edge first shall rise: Then we which are fat-fingered from typing, and remain shall be caught up together with them in the job queue, to meet the Scheduler in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Scheduler, 8"
- 1 COBOLonians 4:16-17

I'm goin' to hell for that. But if you make me program in COBOL again, I'm taking you with me, rapture or not.

Java

[cerberusss]

I guess I'll be talking to those guys at Legacy Reserves, because I heard that Java is the new COBOL...

Re:8" and Pass The Ammunition

[freqres]

But the Holy Bible is where the 1st Commandment is written. If we don't take the Holy Bible too seriously because of the 1st Commandment but the 1st Commandment is written in the Holy Bible but

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