Yo if you are doing COBOL systems maintenance for 90k you arent charging enough.
That’s all this meme means. Consultants on COBOL maintenance can make 90k in a week. This is not the area where companies pinch pennies.
A lot of banks have bootcamps where they pick up unemployed people who might not have ever had tech experience in their life. They teach them COBOL and mainframe basics in a few months, and, if they do well, give them a shitty $60k annual job.
Source: know someone who went to one of these bootcamps and now works for a major us bank.
So you’re saying you can get free training then just leave for a real paying company eh
I imagine they have some absurd contract that says they can’t leave for 89 years or whatever
And I’d like to see that contract hold up in court lol
And people wonder why companies dont train undergrads anymore
Oh, no, educated workers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe companies should value their employees if you want company loyalty.
Oh no, job providers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe people should value their job providers if you want their loyalty.
spoiler
My time on Lemmy (and Reddit before) ironically make me appreciate communism less and less
The trick to exploiting people is keeping them in fear and ignorance.
There are some court cases going on right now about this type of thing. Generally, the payback is only allowed to be for the real cost of training, and only for a few years. So that 60k salary for 3 years is also the right amount to make you worth 150k anywhere else.
This has been going on for decades. My dad became a COBOL programmer in 1980ish after taking an aptitude test in answer to a newspaper ad. Y2K consulting was a pretty good gig.
My experience with Fintech and the financial sector is that they don’t care about how much, they only care about how fast.
They just have understanding of correct criteria of financial success, since they, eh, work with finances.
There is no relationship between what you earn and your skill level. If there were, theoretical physics would be a top paying field. The reason is, this is capitalism and we are horrible negotiators. If you want to earn top money in a technical field, the best you can do is insert yourself in a revenue stream. Roles that are critical to revenue like a billing system or associated with a intrinsically valuable commodity e.g. petrochemical, are more lucrative than other similarly skilled professions.
It feels like blaming everything on capitalism is a Lemmy meme.
EDIT: smh look at all the capitalists smashing the downvote button as if it were a poor.
They’re not really blaming capitalism for anything though? They’re just explaining how it works, and they’re right. In a market driven economy, you are paid for having a skill or some knowledge based on the demand of that skill or knowledge and nothing else. In the same way as the quality of your house has little bearing on it’s value when compared to it’s location. Not a criticism of capitalism.
SIGH. Capitalism is a fringe conspiracy theory. Next you’ll be claiming that billionaires earn their money through “capital gains” instead of salary, or that every corporation answers to a shadowy cabal of “shareholders” who only care about profit.
Well you won’t fool me. Unlike you, I have educated myself by reading newspapers.
TIL repeating the definition of capitalism is blaming capitalism
It wasn’t capitalists, it was the invisible hand of the market.
The more important a job is, the less paid the work is. Conversely, the more bullshit the job is, the more pay there is.
I think some COBOL consultants are very well paid, especially since they are a rare breed.
Friend has a cobol + IBM AIX combo going for him and his on call + at most 1 day/week of work position pays more than my full time very senior dev role.
Hmm I have the AIX half of that. Maybe learning COBOL is worth the pain…
I know a person who does AIX consulting with Cobol. She works about 4-8 weeks a year spread between 3 companies and makes enough to raise a family and fund a massive hobby farm. Helps to be in an area with a large fintech presence I imagine.
Very nice, yeah that’s the problem. I broke into AIX in the wholesale industry in early 2000’s so I have very few finance connections, which is where it all seems to be.
I have also been work from home for 7 years now and figured I’d have to go onsite for banks. That may have changed post covid. I will poke around and see what might be out there for me
Idk what the AIX job market is right now, but several years ago banks in central Europe poached employees back and forth just to reach minimum staff required.
The OGs are. The new trainees ain’t.
Which makes sense, but they are still being seriously taken advantage of.
Is the collective noun for COBOL programmers, cobblers?
I would have gone with COBOLLICKERS
You definitely don’t want a blunt force trauma to this delicate area
That’s because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them “yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you”. Here in Europe, they’ll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you’ve got a grateful new dev who doesn’t know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.programmers desperately need to unionize
For real. Even just talking to your fellow coding monkeys helps. It’s ironic that for example here in France, despite all our workers rights and revolutionary tradition, speaking about your salary is still a social faux-pas. And who benefits? Certainly not us.
I’d understanding actively pressuring someone to share their salary being a faux-pas. Admittedly, just sharing your own may make some people feel pressured to share theirs out of reciprocity, but just sharing your own salary generates nowhere near the same amount of pressure as outright telling someone “share your salary or you’re a bad person on the side of The Man!”
I hope the amount of people sharing their salary increases and talking about it becomes normalized.
A surprising number of people don’t know about levels.fyi
Go to levels.fyi, find some companies and compare at your level. For a long time I was like “ain’t no way these numbers are accurate, people are getting paid that much?” YES THE NUMBERS ARE ACCURATE; your company’s excuses for a shitty raise this year (“blah blah market conditions, blah blah you are already on the upper end of your band, let’s work on a promotion next year”) are bullshit.
I wish they would include the “non-professional” professions. I bet I could have gotten a better pay as a chef if I had any idea what other chefs made at the time.
Does Glass Door have non-office jobs listed? I haven’t looked on there in quite a while but it was the same idea in a more general sense.
I don’t know. They want me to sign up before I’m allowed to look at anything.
Sadly this doesn’t include my profession (Industrial Automation). Do you know of other alternatives?
You could try Glassdoor, but my understanding is that it’s not as accurate as levels.
Man I’d swim to Europe if some company wants to swoop me up and train me for something that valuable lol here in the States I have to not only pay for the training out the nose, but also find the time to do that while still working my regular job lol
Well, you could do like many US people and visit Ireland, I suppose :)
I’d be happy if I could land a web dev role for 40k at this point
That’s crazy. If you have the skills don’t under value yourself. Don’t be afraid to walk away from an offer. Never tell a potential employer your current salary and never give them a number if they ask in interviews. Ask what their range is as a response and if that matches your number, proceed. Then negotiate for the max of their range. If you get to that point, they already want you, so you have the upper hand in negotiation.
I think the mention of fintech in the text makes an implication of online store of some sort, where I could see it being profitable because it’s a lot more work to be able to generate listings and accept payment and shipping information.
It means banking. Finance tech.
That was never in question. Online payment portals are Fintech. You don’t have to work at IBM to be in Fintech, it includes the entire process built on top of their platform as well.
But COBOL is famously used in legacy banking systems, not modern internet payment systems.
I’m saying that the mention of Fintech in the First Case would IMPLY that the WebDev also deals with Fintech. If both devs have comparable skillsets then it makes sense to compare their pay rates.
IDK, maybe I’m reaching with this one.
Not how that format works, mate.
Misusing meme templates is a long programminghumor tradition.
We need strongly typed memes. This place is chaos.
Works for me.
I think the text should be combined into one sentence, which would be run-on but still give the impression that both images refer to one person, as it should be.
Ah, I understand now
Another meme purist. If you guys keep this up you’re going to spawn a new variety of meme.
If it’s constructive then it should be interpreted as good faith.
Is saying “you’re doing it wrong” really constructive?
I didn’t think a step by step guide was really needed to correct it, but maybe I should?
The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.
You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.
The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.
Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?
It’s probably just a definition thing.
To me, constructive criticism means that the criticism doesn’t just point out failure, but that it then also shows how to correct that failure.
By itself, “you’re doing it wrong” is just destructive: it takes something apart, it destroys it. Without a subsequent “and here’s how you would do it right,” it doesn’t become constructive, it doesn’t help in putting things back together in the correct way.
Sure, as a first step, “you’re doing it wrong” is completely justified when something is actually wrong.
But without the second step - the constructive part - it just doesn’t constitute constructive criticism. By itself, it’s just criticism.
Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).
I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…
I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?
I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.
Possibly better suited for Vanya and Five Drive By Each Other
what i’m gathering from this thread is that i should learn cobol
From when this has come up in the past, it’s a lucrative career path, but probably tricky to break in to since nobody’s maintaining a COBOL system they can afford to put into the hands of someone inexperienced.
The dudes earning half a million are able to do so because they’ve been at it since before their boss was born.
Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn’t the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What’s difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.
Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That’s if/else, loops and similar.
It seems that back in the day, people effectively ran a simple compiler by hand on paper. It could work pretty well; Roller Coaster Tycoon was famously written in assembly.
Well, I only wrote simple exercises in Intel assembly in uni, but there were more of those with AVR assembly.
You can structure things nicely and understandably if you want.
It’s an acquired skill just like many others. Just today writing something big fully in assembly is not in demand, so that skill can usually be encountered among embedded engineers or something like that.
Is there a tutorial you could recommend? I’m actually pretty curious how exactly you would go about that now.
Sorry, I don’t remember what I used then as a tutorial, possibly nothing, and I don’t write assembly often, it was just an opinion based on the experience from the beginning of my comment. That said:
You have call and return, so you can use procedures with return. You have compare and conditional jump instructions. And you have timers and interrupts for scheduling. That allows for basic structure.
You split your program functionally into many files (say, one per procedure) and include those. That allows for basic complexity management.
To use OS syscalls you need to look for the relevant OS ABI reference, but it’s not hard.
So all the usual. Similar to the dumber way of using C.
In general writing (EDIT: whole programs, it’s used all the time in codecs and other DSP, at the very least) in assembly languages is unpopular not because it’s hard, but because it’s very slow.
Yeah man, it can’t be worse than JS, right?
Once you get into it you’ll wonder how you ever programmed without “divisions”! I mean honestly, just declaring variables anywhere? Who needs that. Give me a nice, defined data division any day 😌
Where do you learn this… Cobol?
at university in the 1980s
Wait, so there’s nowhere you can learn it now?
Doubtful, I was just joking about how it’s an older language that has become rare
Probably a few CS programs offer courses in it, if nothing else because it’s historically important. And I’m sure one could teach it to themself via books and documentation
My grandmother could teach you it, but she’s dead.
My cobolences.
RIP
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Right, you can make that kind of money when you have 40 years of Cobol behind you. But even for new entrants, $90k seems low. There had better be a premium for dealing with old bullshit, especially when you’re probably damaging your resume in the long run.
Yep I know a COBOL programmer and she drives a nice-ass Mercedes SUV and owns 2 houses. Making way more than I do.
Better learn COBOL now.
90k sounds pretty standard for inexperienced (although maybe not first job) devs in general for most markets. Throw in factors like experience or skills in low supply and that changes pretty fast.
I know that COBOL isn’t going away anytime soon, but most companies have seen the writing on the wall for a long time. Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underway. Some places even have a surplus of COBOL devs because of it. But there are countless places where it can’t be replaced, at least not reasonably.
The only way a COBOL dev is making $90k after 5 years is if there are very specific fringe benefits that make them not want to move along, or they are extremely naive about the market.
Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underw
Rewrites are extremely risky though, and some companies don’t want to risk it. That COBOL code probably has 40 years worth of bug fixes and patches for every possible edge/corner case. A rewrite essentially restarts everything from scratch.
Do you know of a decent sized company that successfully migrated away from COBOL? I’d be interested in reading a whitepaper about how they did it, if such a thing exists.
I thought everyone kind of knew this. And then the PCMag article dropped.
Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
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The historic high salary for COBOL Devs etc is also partially due to them mostly being old and extremely experienced senior devs
In my experiemce, Java shoots processing usage up while COBOL uses much lesser CPU / memory
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$60K doing what and where?
Probably anything outside the US.
That’s what I was thinking. I moved to Europe and my salary was halved. I’m making 70K euros. After three years of scratching this “living in Europe” itch, I’m ready to move back to the U.S. An entry level developer should be making no less than 90K in the land of the free.
€70k as a developer? That’s a middled aged EM salary here in Sweden
I bet. I’m assuming taxes are way higher up there too.
Unfortunately I have to ask, what’s the meaning of EM?
Engineering manager, the one responsible for a team
Yep. Few people where I live envy the US, but if you’re a developer the money is no joke. You have to expect that eventually all those big American tech companies will start offshoring, given the crazy money they could save.
That’s what I tell fellow devs around here. Try the U.S. for one or two years, especially if they offer shares. Then move back. Profit!
I moved from Australia to the USA since salaries for developers are so much higher here. I live in Silicon Valley which helps too. If you’re a senior developer (say 5+ years of experience) then a lot of the large companies here pay $200-300k/year salary plus $100-200k/year in company stock plus a bonus that’s 10-20% of salary if you get a good performance review.
Ugh. Holy shit I went into the wrong field 🥲 I was just a kid. I didn’t know better
I got lucky since I’ve been into computers and programming since I was 8 years old (late 90s). My first job when I was at school was a part-time developer at a tiny IT company that did consulting work. Since then, all my jobs have been software development jobs.
The fact that it pays well in places like Silicon Valley was a great bonus. I moved here 10 years ago (when I was 23) after I got a job offer, and the starting salary was literally double what I was getting paid in Australia at the time.
The job changes a bit as you get more senior - there’s more mentoring of junior devs, project planning, deciding what your team should focus on, etc. I still spend a lot of my time writing code though, and still enjoy it. :)
There’s some downsides to living in Silicon Valley. A lot of stuff is expensive (that applies for California in general, but especially here). Housing is extremely expensive too.
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Hang in there, friend! You’ll make it big sooner rather than later!
How many years experience? It took me a few years before I started making a decent wage.
Definitely keep honing your skills and applying around for different jobs, and taking jobs that you can use to “leapfrog” to other, even better jobs.
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Okay that is getting up in years. I was about there when I started to get more aggressive with the salary I was asking. You could probably start on the
developer I -> developer II -> senior developercareer path.Do you look at other jobs much? Do much networking? Talk to other devs about their salary? Even just grabbing a lunch with some workmates from time to time can help get you in the right mindset of recognising your worth.
