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Do You Know Cobol? If So, There Might Be a Job for You. (wsj.com)
Despite its advanced age, Cobol is still the most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide. Software programmed in Cobol powers millions of banking transactions every day and underpins critical computer mainframes. WSJ: And Cobol isn't going away anytime soon. Banks and other companies have come to the uncomfortable realization that ripping out old mainframes is pricey and complicated. Transitioning to new systems is likely to take years, and besides, a lot of the older tech works just fine. The problem is that Cobol isn't popular with new programmers. So, with a generation of Cobol specialists retiring, there is a continuing hunt to find a new generation of programmers to service this technology. In Texas, Mr. Hinshaw's (an anecdote in the story) company, the Cobol Cowboys, a group of mostly older programmers, is training U.S. military veterans in the programming language. Accenture is coaching hundreds of Cobol programmers every year in India and the Philippines to work at banks. In Malaysia, one consultancy that provides engineers versed in Cobol for its clients, iTAc MSC Outsourcing, has adopted the slogan "Keeping the Dinosaurs Alive." A host of companies offer online courses in Cobol in places like South Africa, India and Bangladesh. Developing economies are key technology-outsourcing centers for banks. Further reading: Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On COBOL, Now Scrambling To Find IT 'Cowboys' To Keep Things Afloat.
oh, not again ... they do not want COBOL programmers, they want programmers who know CICS transactions and DB2, VSAM, etc, who have enough experience to come in and fix production business logic ... I see this article every year or two and it's ... let's all say it together ... NOT COBOL PROGRAMMERS ANYONE WANTS ... if you know COBOL but don't know CICS, you will not get a job... and, hey, there is a huge glut of out of work CICS experts to pick from.
It's nonsense anyway, the idea that Cobol is the most prevalent language in financial services still is complete and utter drivel.
I've worked for a number of financial services organisations, including banks, and I've not come across any still using it. After the whole Y2K drama and the amount they had to spend on contractors they spent the following decade deprecating it, and it's nowhere to be seen in the vast majority of financial services organisations anymore.
If you really want to know what the "most prevalent programming language in the financial-services industry world-wide" is, then it's Java, followed by C# and C++. R, Python, and SAS are fairly common in analytics work, and other specialist areas like quantitative analysis use the above coupled with a whole bunch of more niche language like F# and Ocaml (e.g. Credit Suisse), or even home grown languages like Slang at Goldman Sachs.
But Cobol? Yeah no, where did Slashdot find this article? 1999?
The hard part is reading and following piles of legacy code, some of which may have been written in the "go to" days.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, I used to feel the same way about FORTRAN, then I discovered you could do the same tasks in Python with the right library, far more readable, and only marginally less efficient.
When people are saying they need people to fill "COBOL jobs" they aren't actually looking for COBOL programmers. There are looking for people who are willing to jump into excruciatingly painful dead-end jobs dealing with obsolete technology and working just to keep something afloat.
I had an internship with a Fortune 500 company (not a tech company) working on COBOL software in the late 1990s. The COBOL part was easy. It is a pretty simple (but verbose) language and doesn't take long to learn if you've seen FORTRAN, Ada, or BASIC. What *was* really hard was learning how the reporting and monitoring systems worked (we were basically gathering data from food production machines, reporting and archiving it).
Basically, everything in this division was run on old IBM mainframes (actually new mainframes/minicomputers emulating old operating systems... MVS and AS/400 or something). You didn't have a command line where you did your compile and link stuff... oh no, you had to submit jobs in a very finicky format using the mainframe's JCL (job control language). It was heavily customized for no good reason (that I could tell) so only a few of the really acidic and unpleasant old-timers could help you get your stuff going. You couldn't look this stuff up on your own because it was basically macros built upon macros from I'm guessing the early 1970s.
Anyway, this internship was soul destroying. Like the worst job I ever had. I worked my ass off and barely accomplished anything because the simplest thing was so hard and no one knew what the hell was going on. Every so often a "consultant" from HQ (we were a remote site in a different state from the headquarters) would come, install something, and then he (always a he) would leave while everything broke. Even though my internship was to develop a specific piece of new functionality, I spent most of my time figuring out what was going wrong and patching it.
So technically, I have COBOL experience now, but really I have a bit of experience bashing my head against a custom one-of-a-kind wall, and that experience isn't transferable.
To add insult to injury, it wasn't even a high-paying internship. The only good thing about this company was the culture was everyone was out the door at 4PM (hours were strictly 8AM to 4PM). Once I stayed to 6:30PM to fix a production server that was mangled by a messed up JCL card. (Oh god, the JCL cards. Of course they weren't punch cards because this was the 1990s, but you had to format the commands AS IF THEY WERE FREAKING PUNCH CARDS I guess because they were reusing old punch card parsing code. So, if you put a JCL mnemonic in the wrong column, the job failed. I wish I were making this up, I really do, but I'm not.) Anyway, I stayed till 6:30PM one night and the plant manager was so excited with my "can-do" attitude that he gave me a "golden nickel" which was one free lunch at the plant cafeteria. Yes, this was six months of my sorry life.
I programmed in COBOL. I liked it.
It was easy for me to understand.
What was damned near impossible was straightening out the spaghetti code already in place.
The way to understand an existing system is to fuck around with it and get inside the programmer's head.
Once done, I can anticipate what's coming.
When a system is a hybrid of decades of code by quacks and pros alike, it's a goddam maze.
Management doesn't take that as an excuse and I excused myself from the management.
While the wage was competitive, the stress wasn't worth it.
I'll do startup with COBOL, but there's no market for that.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.