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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."
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.
I just searched Google for Learn Cobol and only got 417k results. Not that popular a subject anymore I suppose.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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?
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.
People still using COBOL can migrate to COBOL.net. Fujitsu implemented a this abmonination.
Of course it's a complete coincidence that when the story mentions COBOL, the /. fortune cookie I get says "VMS must die.".
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Thus sayeth IT technical college.
God spoke to me.
it's a fscking advertisement.
Not that there aren't a few good soundbites in it, but come on, a consultant defending consultants isn't news.
now that the geniuses with their MBAs have figured out that overseas outsourcing is an even bigger disaster than domestic outsourcing was. ("But how can that be! It's CHEAPER!") I'm hearing from recruiters again. IT is such a huge force multiplier that it's stupid to do anything that will jeopardize its effectiveness. Labor cost is only one variable in the multivariable problem, kids.
Sure, the PHBs will whine about the need for cheap H1-Bs that they can abuse, but I don't see Congress being all that sympathetic at the moment, or at the very least they're too fragmented on the issue of immigration in general to get anything done.
Boom times are here again! Well, no, but at this point somewhat better than average middle class employment will do.
I dunno, I never have liked to tie myself to one language or another. Maybe it's the CS major, but I find that all languages have things in common, and that I can quickly become proficient in each.
Sure I have my favorite languages, but I treat each language I come across equally; hell, I tolerated and become proficient in Scheme of all things. This way, if the flavor of the day goes away, I can simply pick up a book on the new flavor, figure out how it does business, and get to work.
Good principles and techniques transcend language boundaries.
You can't defeat physics.
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.
I'm -still- trying to find a job with my Turtle Logo skills.....
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
Sounds like the Rapture to me.
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.
I know I will get flamed by some out-of-work programmers out there,
.
but...
There are too many companies that refuse to move out of the computing Bronze-Age; bite the bullet and upgrade.
The town that I work in (Blue-collar auto-industry) is filled with tool & die shops. Typical scenerio: The owner left the assembly line of Ford/GM/whatever 20 years ago and created his own company. He bought a DOS app to run his business on a 286-server/workstation, and he is surprised and insulted to find out that XP won't run on it.
I have seen shops that Net revenue >$10 million/year, and they depend on a app written in BASIC!!!! as their life-blood.
Holy shit people, it might be time to upgrade!
There is a reason we don't (all) still use Horse & buggys. There is still a market for companies to make horse-shoes and buggy whips, (and I bet that company has a monopoly) but there are valid reasons to upgrade.
There will always be a need for Legacy-based skills, but for the love of $deity don't hold onto old tech that you think "Well it used to be good enough!"
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
"Straits", man. Not "straights".
I see, daily, an annoying point where IT users are OVER-trained in one technology set, which blinds them to more efficient and effective resolutions to company computer service and infrastructure.
My business concentrates on Mac OS X systems used in a publishing environment. They work much like their Windows counterparts and could even be integrated with the larger domain for more efficiency. But when I speak of this to others they look at me with confusion and, maybe, heresy?
These people act as if Macs are toys or inferior in some way. Of course, this is far from the case, but their training has changed how they see technology. This really isn't the old Mac/PC debate. (Apple lost the first war. But they still found an important place in today's computing world.)
No computer technology is perfect, of course. But the mistaken ubiquity that IT is Microsoft and Microsoft is IT makes all other non-MS technicial initiatives and products harder to sell in concept or through a store.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I guess I'll be talking to those guys at Legacy Reserves, because I heard that Java is the new COBOL...
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However, when one is looking for work, it seems that one is usually labelled as a "specialist" in whatever technical platform and language used in the last position.
A person with both good knowledge of C and good knowledge of COBOL is usually seen as being a "COBOL programmer" if their last work experience was mainly writing COBOL code.
It sounds silly, I know, but that's what I've seen (and what many others I know have also seen) in the current job market.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
VB6 is dead. Start cranking out .NUT and C# on the double, drone!
Seriously, I think I remember reading that MS said that end-of-life for VB6 is coming up in 2006 or so, but can't find the article where I read that. If it exists, it's likely buried deep within MS's site.
The best advice I could give to someone who's been buried under a pile of MS technology for most of his/her education/career would be to go out and pick up some non-MS languages. That way, if Redmond (or its language of the month) disappears tomorrow, there's a chance that you'll still be employable, and you'll gain a perspective on programming that you might not otherwise have. That's just my opinion, though, and I'm sure there are thousands of MS flamers who would say that once you've gone down that path, you're damaged goods anyway. Take this sort of rambling in either direction with a tumbler of salt.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
I've dealt with these guys. They are satisfied with what they're getting out of that type of system and will keep it till the power surge blows it away. Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if some of them checked Ebay for replacement hardware. I'm sure they know were they put those 5.25 floppies.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
When I worked for a major airline, the flight planning system I supported and helped enhance was written in Fortran and running on a Unisys 2200 mainframe (which is an older architecture but also a fairly reliable and *modern* platform in terms of its actual hardware).
Fortran was (and is) a perfect language for the type of problem being solved, since a lot of it actually does involve semi-complex calculations.
The mainframe platform is also ideal, as the system is designed as a centralized software app running on a large-scale server and being used by folks all over the world on remote terminals (be they "green screens" or web clients).
Sometimes the older languages and platforms in use really *are* a good fit. Or is it change for changes sake that you're asking for?
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
http://www.bls.gov/search/ooh.asp?ct=OOH
Pick just about any job and in the listing you'll find something like this:
Employment of XXXXX is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations over the 2002-12 period. However, job opportunities are expected to be very good because a large number of XXXXX are expected to retire in the coming decade, creating many job openings.
Does anyone truly believe this? No. The only group of people that typically exploit this figure is someone trying to sell you something.
Read up on your history of programming languages, of Grace Hopper's writings on COBOL, and if you can find them (very difficult), contemporary advertisements/reviews of COBOL for the time - you will find that indeed, it was marketed as a "simple, english-like" language for business people. At the time, it was very simple - compared to custom assembler for each mainframe (which was almost always different between machines even from the same manufacturer, like IBM), COBOL was a breeze!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
A carpenter is not a hammer-er, or a saw-er, or a drill-er. He is expected to be able to quickly learn and use any of those tools, as needed for the project. A new project can use a new tool (language, os, whatever) as needed for the application. When an old program needs maintenence, it may require some re-learning of the old tool, but that should not be difficult.
I suspect the harder problem is preserving the old development systems and tools. If the compiler (or some other tool) hasn't been used in several years, there is a good chance that it won't work. Or, that we can't find it at all because it didn't get loaded onto the new host before the old host was scrapped. Or, that the old hard-copy manuals (how to use the tools) have rotted and/or been discarded in the trash.
...but rather the database and transaction (or batch) environment that the COBOL itself runs in.
:-) Although he might survive the shock if he's been exposed to REXX...
An IBM CICS programmer familiar with DB2 would have a tough time coming into a Unisys A-series shop that uses COMS and DMSII, not to mention the culture shock when his JCL-conditioned mind runs into a job control language like WFL.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
One must be cautious when they hear the word "labor shortage". Lobbying organizations such as ITAA are paid millions of dollars from large tech companies to lobby congress and the papers about the doom and gloom of tech labor shortages. This is to justify more visa workers and offshoring. In other words, the "cheap labor lobby".
I am not saying that this is necessarily what the article's author has heard, but it would not surprise me. Organizations like ITAA are shrewd and tenacious. They recently managed to influence many small-city newspapers to publish articles about the dangers of tech labor shortages by quoting companies who allegedly will go under unless they import Indians or move to India. Their leader, Harris Miller, lobbied for more agricultural migrants (fruit pickers) from Mexico in his previous job, according to some sources.
The excuse is the same for tech as it was for agriculture: "Americans don't want fruit-picking jobs". At $3-per-hour, who would? They want to do to tech what they did for agriculture. Different career, same plan.
They should be on the same "geek enemy list" as SCO.
Table-ized A.I.
found at top of page linked from article:
"Welcome to Legacy Reserves, the largest U.S. databank of Legacy Professionals over the age of 35"
I think that is a new low in setting the threshold for being "over the hill". This means I was old 20 years ago...god, somebody see if I still have a pulse!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Firms are populated by some of the dumbest blindest self serving retards on the planet. There is no shortage of labot. Let me repeat that - THERE IS NO shortage of labor.
What there is a shortage of is 45 year olds with 20 years of experience in a 5 year old technology and willing to relocate halfway across the country for a 50% pay cut on a contract basis for six months.
The COBOL jocks who are still around are not in it for altruistic purposes. They are in it to make a killing. Don't think so? Ok - more than half of the country's COBOL, etc. hands were fired in the mid 90's with 'consolidation' and 'modernization'. Then those same idiots who fired everyone freaked out when they simply couldn't answer their own auditors questions about Y2K.
It was magic. All the middle aged guys who got fired coming back to work and literally pulling a rate number out of their ass. $100/hr sound ok to you? $125? Good cause that's what it's to cost you.
Well here we are 4 years into a capital investment recession in IT and guess what? Those same old Mainframes are still around and COBOL and CICS and JCL are still running on them. Because that work NEVER got done ten years ago. It was too expensive and was crowded out by Y2K.
So second generation executards call in the oldtimers again, this time to 'fix' the mainframe problem because the leases are coming due and the CFO is absofuckinglutely convinced that and ICC capital lease iis more expensive than junking everything and starting over.
Hey I've heard this Opera before. It was called "Client Server Computer".
But make no mistake about it my fellow greyheads. They have about as much respect for you and your skills as they have for the beaker that collects bull semen. What you have to do is rape them on the contract.
And in 3 or 4 years and the progress is excruciatingly slow and they suddenly come back from Gartner executive retreats with the new found knowledge that mainframe is new paradigm they must strategize, optimize and leveragize they'll drop all the migration efforts and put their money back into mainframe system development.
Trust me, IBM would not continue to invest all that money in MVS and z/OS Large Systems if they thought there was a limited future in it.
Every couple of years there is the same old new revolution in commercial IT. It's part of the scenery like starving African children with automatic weapons. Sell them more weapons.
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
Guru Meditation
Stack Overflow
Rampant Ninja related crimes these days...Whitehouse is not the exception
Besides, I've seen online stores selling *palettes* of 486-class boxes for almost nothing that would probably still run that older application, and one of those would give him spare hardware for the next several hundred years. :-)
Sounds to me like he's got a sane idea.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
To implement the software on modern gear would require a tremendous amount of time just sorting out what everone does and why. It's a much larger problem than just sitting down and hacking it out, even if you have the original source and want to blindly follow the last guy's design.
And then sometimes they just can't match the performance of the old system. IBM's been trying to do away with their RETAIN system since I first started working for them back in the mid '90's. At the time they thought they'd go to a Lotus Notes app on their 486 servers. After all, the 486 was designed to give you the same performance on your desktop as a mainframe, right? Sure, for a single user! They never could figure out how to match RETAIN's performance. To this very day they're still maintaining it. I don't think anyone understands it anymore, really. It's millions of lines of mainframe assembler code from what I hear. It's like this ancient evil that lurks under the surface of the apparently peaceful company, just waiting to consume the souls of young programmers. With Tentacles.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?