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Cobol Job Market Heating Up

Posted by timothy on from the dress-the-part-at-the-interview dept.

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."

6 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. How do people learn it? by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I usually turn to O'Reilly for getting started with a new language, but oddly they don't have a guide to COBOL (similar situation with LISP, which I'd love to master). How do people learn COBOL? I notice there's a COBOL for Dummies , but I honestly doubt it's a rigorous intro.

  2. Why is Cobol still alive? by mmxsaro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why is Cobol still alive and in demand? What's so good about it? Why can't we just port everything over to a newer language and be done with it?

    Doesn't it cost more to keep paying these rare programmers than to just update/convert/replace the systems?

    1. Re:Why is Cobol still alive? by Ngarrang · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why is Cobol still alive and in demand? What's so good about it? Why can't we just port everything over to a newer language and be done with it?

      Doesn't it cost more to keep paying these rare programmers than to just update/convert/replace the systems?

      Because it is cheaper to patch code written in 1970, than re-write it and go through the QA process to insure the end product does the same thing.

      That is why.

      --
      Bearded Dragon
    2. Re:Why is Cobol still alive? by Mariognarly · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's alive because its ancient, and it was designed by the military. It was designed with the intent to be as robust as possible, and as simple as possible... and that's why it still runs the majority of mainframes today. Mainframe code also doesn't need to be changed that often. There just hasn't been any new latest and greatest features in any other language viable enough to justify a code conversion. My prof in uni was a COBOL guy, and his masters thesis touched on OOP vs top down single line programming featuring C vs COBOL, and the code complexity between the two. He showed us several applications written in C, and COBOL that did the same thing. More often than not the C code was 10-20 pages long, and the COBOL was 2-4. We usually could comprehend and update the COBOL code much faster than the C. The integration with databases was far more seamless, and it just was a really pleasant programming experience. Lots of kids (including myself) loved COBOL because it was easy to wrap their heads around it logically and structurally, while lots of the traditional OOP kids struggled because it was out of the norm of their experience. I believe the going rate for COBOL programmers back when I was in uni was $230 / hr. They were pulling a lot of people out of retirement to fulfill projects, and my prof was one of them. Kinda cool niche to the industry I think.

    3. Re:Why is Cobol still alive? by McSnarf · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Now... As a former COBOL programmer - this is not just switching one outdated language to something new. For one, COBOL is actually excellent when it comes to doign things it was meant to do, which is commercial software. Need a choice of storing numbers in characters, BCD or float? Reasonable string handling (UNSTRING comes to mind) and a gazillion of other useful features? COBOL is somewhat limited, but very powerful for a certain, limited set of applications. PL/I can do about everything COBOL can - and better, but for some reason, it never became THAT popular.

      (Now if it COBOL only had an ALTER ... TO PROCEED TO ... DEPENDING ON ... )

      I doubt that you can translate it automatically into somewhat readable code in whatever language of choice you might have in mind. That, plus the fact that a lot of COBOL code in use today has been working (and been improved) for more years than Linus Torvalds spent on this planet so far, makes it difficult to replace. (Not to mention the side effects. Imagine rewriting - from scratch - a complex insurance application which comes with CICS (no problem, runs under loads of platforms nowadays), VSAM (you don't want to know) and other file access methods and tons of JCL written for a JES3 environment. Trust me - Unix is trivial by comparison. And you need to understand both to migrate the stuff.

  3. I'm a 33-yr-old COBOL guy by daemonenwind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A couple of things people should realize when thinking about getting into mainframe/cobol:

    1. COBOL programmers are 99.9% baby boomers. If you want to spend your next decade getting talked down to by a 50-something or 60-something who thinks they're a programming god because of their teaching degree and 30 years writing COBOL, then you're probably into leather and whips, and would be happier staying in your dungeon. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

    2. COBOL is not challenging to learn (it's designed that way), and the programming tasks are largely mundane. You'll be working almost exclusively on data processing tasks, because that's what the mainframe does best: massive throughput of number crunching.

    3. You shouldn't just learn COBOL, you should spend time with JCL and DB2's version of SQL, and some CICS concepts would serve you very well. But without JCL and DB2, you're practically useless anyway. But they're not hard to learn.

    4. zOS also runs Java now, so if we just stay back and let it rot, eventually perhaps they'll just throw it all to Java.

    5. It's hard to just "take a class" on COBOL, but forward-thinking companies are starting to train people like disaffected teachers, just like what was done in the 70's. So if you want to work with/clean up after that sort of developer....

    If, after all this, you really want to know more, IBM has most of the useful documentation online.
    http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/cobol/zos/library/

    But the "dummies" book should serve you very well.

    Oh, and once you start working with them, expect lots of, "Why does my PC do this", kind of questions, because most of the COBOL people I've met in shops aren't very technical. (IBM people are bright enough though)