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$10,000 more a year upon graduation than classmates who hadn't. COBOL, dropped from many curricula years ago as an outdated language, is tenaciously holding on in the industry, as many universities are belatedly starting to realize.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