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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$10,000 more a year upon graduation than classmates who hadn't. COBOL, dropped from many curricula years ago as an outdated language, is tenaciously holding on in the industry, as many universities are belatedly starting to realize.
I looked in to Cobol rolls as a potential career shift as I keep reading on Slashdot how amazing a Cobol job can be...
After a quick scan of most UK job sites for Cobol in London (where all the banks are ..) e.g.
http://www.indeed.co.uk/Cobol-...
Pretty much all roles are £40l-£60k a year and require some kind of real world, commercial experience with Cobol/mainframes etc etc
That's not that exciting, The salaries are lower than equivalent positions in other areas of development. You have to work for someone like Lloyds. Chances are you'll need to wear a suit to work. Have to work in London. By definition, you're going to be supporting ancient, systems which have undergone years of maintenance by probably dozens of different developers and it's going to be super enterprisey, loaded to the gills with change control and red tape, etc etc.
I don't get it.. sounds awful..
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
One in high school in the late 80s, and one college course while in the military.
Of course, I may need to freshen that up a bit.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Working for others may get you a decent living, but if you really, and I mean, REALLY want to earn a lot of money, working for others won't make you rich
I started by working for high tech companies, some decades ago. Yes, I did earn really decent wages, much better than most of my peers at that time. But I didn't stop there
When I was working, I noticed niche markets that were not being fulfilled. I got out and started my own companies (plural) to do just that
Some of the companies I sold to others, some I kept. A lot of people are working with me right now, but I gotta tell you, no matter how much I pay them (and yes, I do pay my co-workers very handsomely) they still do not earn as much as I
The moral is very simple --- if you really want to be wealthy, stop being a worker, and start being an entrepreneur
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
However, since if it is still being used, then it still has some capability that is not available in other solutions.
No, no, no, no!
COBOL is still in use because because mid-to-large corporations spend many millions of dollars on systems that WORKED, and now it's far cheaper to keep them working, the same old way, than it is to do it all over again with modern equipment and languages.
This is called "installed base" and it's a particular problem for COBOL because that was one of the first business languages, and has one of the largest, large-corporation "installed bases".
COBOL has nothing to offer that newer languages don't do better. Not. One. Thing.
I took COBOL -- late 90's.
The one job interview I went on where I could put that skill to use showed me why I *wouldn't* want such a job.
The issue wasn't the language per se, it was the fact that most companies still using COBOL are also trapped in chronically underfunded and undervalued IT departments, holding old machines and apps together with bailing wire and duct tape.
students who took an elective COBOL class earned on average $10,000 more a year upon graduation than classmates who hadn't
Makes me think if this is median or mode average. Maybe there's a single expert who got some crazy $10,000,000/a mission critical deal. ;)
While it's quite reasonable that the extra pay is because these people get good jobs developing COBOL, is it perhaps possible that it's more about the mentality of the person who takes such a course?
For example, if I'm interested in making lots of money I'll go into financial software. A lot banks still use COBOL, so doing a course on that increases my options in this area. Even if I don't use it ever again, and don;t even go into banking, I'm still a lot more likely to work for a company that pays a lot because money motivates me.
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.
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
Well, if the source code is not available, it doesn't pay to learn COBOL.
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.
C has goto. C has pointers. C pointers can be cast to something that is a different size... most of the disadvantages you've described seem to apply to C as well, care to enlighten me on the difference (other than bad programmers) .
null
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.
I think it's this more than anything else. My best friend's father is a COBOL programmer. He came down with hairy cell leukemia and was down part time while he went through chemo and all that stuff. The company was completely understanding, and from what I hear gave him a friggin raise when he came back because they didn't have anyone else who could do what he did and they were scared of him retiring early due to health reasons.
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