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."

Comments

Write that shit for a living???

[tha_mink]

Kill me.

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[TheNinjaroach]

How about we just mod you down instead?

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[theaveng]

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?"

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[dedazo]

$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.

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[theaveng]

$120 an hour?!?!? If I can learn the mess that is 8502 assembly, I can surely learn the Cobol mess too.

(runs off to find tutorial)

How do people learn it?

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:How do people learn it?

[Ethanol-fueled]

COBOL SYNTAX TURNS MANY NOOBS AWAY BECAUSE IT IS ALWAYS YELLING AT THEM.

That's why the only people who can stand to work with it are elderly who are hard of hearing.

Re:How do people learn it?

[truthsearch]

To learn how to program on Linux years ago I scrapped together some used computer parts, put together a Linux system, and dove into code.

So to learn Cobol I guess I'd go dumpster diving for a mainframe. Hopefully one with some code left on it.

Re:How do people learn it?

[plasmacutter]

Then Oreilly should be an excellent start..

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

Re:How do people learn it?

[VeNoM0619]

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.

Why is Cobol still alive?

[mmxsaro]

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?

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[truthsearch]

A company can spend a few million dollars rewriting and thoroughly testing a replacement system. Or they can spend less than 10% of that to have one Cobol developer keep the system up and running.

Very often, the old systems have been working smoothly for many years. A rewrite will bring a monstrous amount of headaches and cost, especially for key systems like financial transactions.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[Ngarrang]

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.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[McSnarf]

The thing is - most mainframe custoemrs kept up with hardware changes. Old code written on a 370 will still run (as binary) on modern mainframe hardware, which will, of course, run circles around the usual unix box and floss it's teeth with ripped-off heads of web designers.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[Mariognarly]

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.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[DerekLyons]

Why is Cobol still alive and in demand?

Because there still exists in the world companies and people that have priorities other than "the latest l33t technology".
 

Why can't we just port everything over to a newer language and be done with it?

Assuming the hardware can run the newer language of course... But you still have to face the same basic problem, in a few years your l33t "newer language" will no longer be l33t or newer - it's be the stodgy old stuff that only crusty old farts program on. What then? Go through the same exercise every five to ten years?
 
That sounds more like a recipe for keeping programmers employed, regardless of value, than it does for keeping a system stable and operational. (Which a large part of why IT is often viewed with such suspicion in many quarters - because the constant rewrite/upgrade cycle that keeps the IT departments e-penis turgid rarely seems to provide much of a ROI.)
 

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

A handful of (COBOL) programmers costs the company just a couple of million dollars a year for a stable functional system. A stable of ($l33t_language) programmers costs about the same, plus the potential costs of hardware changes, plus the potential for months of disruption or loss of data...

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[McSnarf]

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.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[Locke2005]

Have you seen the documentation for those legacy systems?

Neither has anyone else!

Trust me, porting code you don't understand is not an option.

Short supply?

[dedazo]

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.

Hand me my walker, it's time to get paid

[AppyPappy]

Cue up the Theme from Shaft, I'm ready to walk that aisle. Twenty-eight years later, I am ready for my place in the sun. You bunch of Java-smoking hippies make a hole cause I'm coming through. I told you that personal microcomputers were a flash in the pan. Take your Winchester drives and Hercules graphics and shove em up your ass. Big Iron is here to stay.

Dammit, where are my car keys? Honey, where are the keys to the Citation?

Yeesh!

[Benfea]

In other news, Cthulu has risen and has started eating nuns.

I think you meant

[Hognoxious]

SUBTRACT 1 FROM WS-OLD-KARMA GIVING WS-NEW-KARMA.

There, fixed that for you.

I'm a 33-yr-old COBOL guy

[daemonenwind]

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)

time flies

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it 9999 already???

Cobol is primed for a comeback?

[killmofasta]

And so is Brain Damage:

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence." (1968) - Dijkstra

Just think of COBOL as a scripting language

[Animats]

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.

It's a trick!

[Locke2005]

I used to joke about "Visual Cobol" being the next big thing in computer languages... that is, until I learned that it's a real product!
I still think this is a trick to get all those Chinese and Indian software engineers to train for a worthless language, so we can get our old jobs back...