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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$10,000 more a year upon graduation than classmates who hadn't. COBOL, dropped from many curricula years ago as an outdated language, is tenaciously holding on in the industry, as many universities are belatedly starting to realize.
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.
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
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.