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College Students: Want To Earn More? Take a COBOL Class
jfruh writes: With a lot of debate over the value of a college education, here's a data point students can use: at one Texas college, students who took an elective COBOL class earned on average $10,000 more a year upon graduation than classmates who hadn't. COBOL, dropped from many curricula years ago as an outdated language, is tenaciously holding on in the industry, as many universities are belatedly starting to realize.
Chances are you'll need to wear a suit to work.
This has always puzzled me why some developers list this as a negative. What is wrong with wearing a suit? Every professional workplace has an expectation of a formal atire. What is wrong with requiring suits over the usual office shirts and pants?
Wearing a suit everyday is a pain in the ass. Are you daft?
Quite simply, it's less comfortable to wear. Considering how much you spend at work, even minor differences in comfort can be very important and well worth the salary difference.
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Every professional workplace has an expectation of a formal atire.
No, they don't. This is a statement made by someone about ready to REtire.
Most high-paying tech jobs today do not require a suit and many not even an office to go into. Often you can work at home in your pajamas, if you like.
Yes, really.
One problem with it is that the bizarre notion that a suit is "professional" is a tool of social exclusion, and anyone wearing one where it's expected will support the notion, and hence help to exclude people who aren't interested in them or can't afford them.
Also simply just having to abandon my own personal culture and yield to a hateful culture where we judge people by arbitrary qualities of the clothing they wear is an awful feeling, and if I could do this willingly, I wouldn't be so good at demanding correctness elsewhere, and hence writing disciplined and secure code. You want to be able to be yourself at a place you'll be spending a significant proportion of your life. The suits game is wrong on multiple levels, and utterly rejecting it is part of my being.
If you work in any field involving network infrastructure, software development, information services, or data management/warehousing and your salary is at all dependent upon your attire, I strongly suggest you inquire with competing firms. You may well find they're paying better and place fewer arbitrary burdens upon their personnel.
Write failed: Broken pipe
And in many cases they probably can't do it over. We're talking about major financial and operational programs that weren't designed so much as they evolved along with the business over the course of the last half-century (since the introduction of the IBM System/360). The specs and requirements, if they exist at all, are buried in the back of a warehouse the size of Warehouse 13 and have probably been turned into nests for the mutant rats. The source code in many cases doesn't match the binaries or doesn't exist at all thanks to errors in migrating data and mistakes in editing files. The running binaries may literally be the only authoritative statement of what rules the company's accounting follows. There's a reason every single IBM mainframe since the S/360 has been capable of emulating an S/360 down to the hardware level, after all.
If you don't care about what kind of job you get, just how much money you make, then:
a) You will make more money than someone who considers other factors in their choice of career.
b) You will take any courses which you're told will enhance your marketability, no matter how disgusting. Like COBOL.
Hence it's unsurprising that people who take COBOL make more money... but is it *because* they took COBOL? That's less clear. Correlation is not causation.
This is a typical thing: The "modern" solutions are all bells and whistles, but are missing basic things or do them wrong. More often than not, this is because they were designed by people that saw some real or perceived shortcomings in older tech, but completely missed its strengths and failed to reproduce them.
Example: Ever tried to do massive multi-threading in Java? That fails miserably and the byte-code interpreter does nothing but task-switching very soon. In an "enterprise" setting, these things are toys when the back-end is considered.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well buddy you and any job you have can go fuck itself. My particular job requires an engineering degree - in itself requiring a high degree of literacy, numeracy and the discipline to study those subjects. It requires that I understand a wide range of complex technical subjects, that I can analyse things that have never been done before, can effectively and accurately devise ways to design, implement and test those things. I will work long hours for no extra reward in an area that frequently has hard to measure outcomes and progress projects which can take years to reach a prototype stage. If you're planning to hire me solely because I can shave and buy a suit then I have no desire to work for you. Oh, and if you want someone who does what I do and is good at it... well I'm afraid it is you who is in the queue, not me.
One of the things I think when I look at something like that is, the $10k difference is illustrating how much more people make that care enough about computer science/programming to take the time to explore many languages - not so much that they are all getting COBOL jobs, they are just more competent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't think those kids go out into the wide, wide, world to program COBOL. I suspect that the subset of CS majors that care enough about real-world jobs are the sort to take a COBOL class, just in case it comes in handy. You'd probably also see that these students are more likely to pursue computer-related summer and in-school part-time jobs, more likely to participate in open-source projects etc.
I know that when I was looking for jobs, I had a whole stack of job offers, despite a middling GPA. Some of the other students in my dept. struggled to find a job, despite better grades. The difference? Two computer-related summer jobs, four different tech-related work-study jobs, and a LOT of extra-curricular study in IT. If my school had a COBOL course, I probably would have taken it. (I did take a SQL course, which wasn't even offered by the CS dept.; it was in the business school, along with the other IT (vs. CS) classes.)
Speaking for myself, I like working for the man! I get to spend my entire workday (consisting of reasonable work hours) doing something I enjoy (Enterprise IT architecture.) Yes, "The Man" makes more off me than they pay me (they are a profit-making company, after all!)
But in return for the 6% Net Profit they report annually, The Man does all the things I don't want to, like Sales, Marketing, Legal, Accounting, Administration, Management, Benefits, etc. I don't want to do those things myself, nor am I particularly interested in figuring out how to manage somebody else doing those things for me.
I do well enough... I'm on track to retire comfortably at 50 after years of doing work I enjoy and working with people I like (and don't have to manage!), and I have a lot less stress than a serial Entrepreneur.
If doing all that scut-work, or managing others to do it for you, is what floats your boat, more power to you! But it's certainly not for everyone.
You sound a bit unhinged.
Did it ever occur to you that some people don't mind being employees? I'm not sure how you equate "working for somebody else" with inevitable serfdom. I show up for work for reasonable hours under reasonable working conditions, I do my job, they pay me for it, I go home. Nobody took rights away from me; if I don't like the arrangement, I tell my boss it's over and I go elsewhere. No violence necessary or wished-for.
Yes, sounds great. Make 10K more out of the gate. And if you're finding it tough to land a job right now, what a DEAL this is! You're employed! You're really needed since the number of COBOL programmers to support legacy systems are dying off (figuratively and literally).
There's the catch. They've got you. You don't know it, but they know it.
Next year, your fellow grads who got jobs are learning TONS of new things, other skills. Team building, real life design. Team leadership. They're getting mentored perhaps. They'll make their way up to intermediate, then senior developers. Maybe into architecture.
But you're still slogging through COBOL code. Supporting legacy systems.
And they can't afford to lose you, so your company (A Bank most likely - not the fastest moving group in the world (and I know since I've worked for three)). So you're still COBOL programming. But, y'know, thanks for the effort. Here's a 2K bonus.
Uour friends are now 2 years along in their careers, they're moving to new jobs, making 10-20K more since they can show job experience, skills experience, and real-life development qualities.
You're even or a bit behind, pay-wise. But they're going places. You're about to stand still, career-wise.
In a year they shoot past you, and that's that. You're standing still. Cost-of-living increases if you're lucky. But hey! We at the bank really appreciate it. So here's a nice mouse pad, and the latest patch release for COBOL on the Z-Frame.
So, no movement here. What to do? I know!! Other companies need COBOL programmers. I'll play the field and see who will throw me more money.
Great. You make a bit more money. Doing EXACTLY the same thing, somewhere else, with little if any career growth. It's possible you will always have a job, since COBOL is entrenched, and not going anywhere. But that's all you'll ever do. That and cut 1650 reels with your teeth.
Don't Do it. It's a trap.