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Cobol Job Market Heating Up
snydeq writes "Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren't going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today."
I'd disagree with that. Schools in India are still providing lots of people with mainframe skills. The whole shebang, like InfoMan, CICS, etc. Not just Cobol. At least that's my impression. I see a lot of people from Tata, InfoSys and IBM Global Services doing mainframe-centric maintenance and even new development at companies I have contact with these days.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I'll do it!!! I'd even be willing to clean toilets if they paid me engineering wages. Yes I'm a sellout. "I know Cobol, and I charge $90 an hour. When do you want me to start?"
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
$90? You're selling yourself cheap. Try somewhere around $120, for starters. It goes up from there. And these are rates for long-term projects, not wham/bam/thankyou/ma'am two week gigs to solve some obscure CICS problem.
That's assuming you have the resume and enough systems experience to back it up, but most people who do COBOL for a living do anyway.
In the mid-00s I seriously considered learning COBOL and C mainframe development after seeing how much those old farts from IBM were pulling in. It's far from sexy, but it's a lot of cash.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
And so is Brain Damage:
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence." (1968) - Dijkstra
Typically, with these old systems, adapting to new business needs and adding new functionality are done secondary to the core system. For example, at MasterCard all transactions eventually go through the ancient mainframe system. That feeds daily into a very modern data warehouse, where all the new applications perform reporting and analysis. These newer systems can be changed as often as necessary without any impact to the old mainframes.
Reduced operational costs and reduced consulting fees would very often be offset by the cost of the rewrite and ongoing maintenance of the newer system.
Developers: We can use your help.
While a joke, I must disagree/explain. It does not require you to use all uppercase.
The only problem I have with COBOL is that every variable is a global variable, defined at program startup.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Just think of COBOL as a scripting language for business applications. Yes, the syntax is wordy. But the big advantage of COBOL isn't in the procedural code. It's in the data declarations. COBOL has very clear ways to talk about external data structures, and good integration with external data in files and databases.