In Canada, the Ministry of Health pays colleges to teach kids COBOL and JCL. It’s a steady job, pension, good bennies. I know a handful of people who went that route, rather than the riskier private sector.
Would you happen to know how that compares to saying “Fuck it” and going with a Java career for the relative predictability? I’m not asking for any particular reasons, just curious.
I know some Java folks, but my sampling is biased because I meet them where I work - places that predominantly use the younger languages. Actually, I happen to know that the MoH in particular (and probably lots of other institutions) wrap their COBOL/JCL in a lot of Java, so that most devs never need to dive into the “real backend” if they want to just stay at the Java level.
Java people seem like family people. But from what I’ve observed, their job doesn’t seem any different. You can work in javascript, or python, and still insist on clocking out at 16, 1700. But I only work at startups or seat of your pants kinds of places, so I know about what I hear. 🤷
Cobol is the B-52 of programming languages. Sure there are fancy and expensive new ones or there, but it’ll probably outlast them all.
That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s Fortran and B-52. Fortran is very good at what it does to this day. Cobol was never good.
Grace Fucking Hopper
So move fast and break things, 60s edition.
Cobol is a Hornet. Still used for production in first-world countries, but basically just because of shitty, slow-moving institutions.
Where do you learn this… Cobol?
My grandmother could teach you it, but she’s dead.
RIP
My cobolences.
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
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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.
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.
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!
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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.
Hang in there, friend! You’ll make it big sooner rather than later!
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
The historic high salary for COBOL Devs etc is also partially due to them mostly being old and extremely experienced senior devs
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Something that maybe a software engineer union could solve.
Something that a union would definitely solve. What are the banks gonna do? Fire every veteran and hire a team of underpaid newbs to manage their critical systems? If they were dumb enough to do that, let them save themselves millions a year by facing billions in losses… I’m sure that’ll work out well.
Banks: Hold my beer!
And later blame it on the workers that unionized.
It only needs to work long enough for the current management to cash in on their savings. Then it’s their successors problem.
The thing is, this type of job never needed a union previously. It was niche enough for a long time, that you were sought out and rewarded well. But yes, I think we’re moving into an era where we do need union representation.
Oddly enough, with my experience I am sought out still. Just for bizarre startups who clearly never checked my previous work history. Some of the messages I get on Linkedin for example are just weird requests.
If only there was one, I wish I had one just so I wouldn’t have to do all the fucking social hoops just to get my resume noticed by an actual human before the HR’s “I don’t want to do my job!” machines filter me out for not going to an Ivy League School like apparently everyone else did.
Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more
At what point does the cost of tech migration outweigh the cost of training people on a more and more specialist paid language just to not have to migrate to a memory safe higher level language like C or Go or Rust or Lua.
Didn’t say python because oh sweet Jesus the slowdown alone would grind the global economy to a halt if we were running all our banking software on Python XD
C and memory safety, name a more iconic duo /s
Something something better tools too shoot yourself in the foot with something something
The trick will be reverse engineering a lot of the mechanics. Also some old systems control hardware that still works and will be replaced when the hardware is replaced.
Didn’t say python because oh sweet Jesus the slowdown alone would grind the global economy to a halt if we were running all our banking software on Python XD
ah so we just need to persuade banks to switch to python. Noted
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.
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.
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.
Who would’ve thought a sector with gold flowing through its hands would be so stingy when it comes to updating their backend that they’d end up relying on a dying language, and call upon AI to update it for them rather than just paying a competent team to create and rigorously test a new backend in a modern language
One problem is that they need to put a price tag and therefore a timeline on such a project. Due to the complexity and the many unknown unknowns in theses decades worth of accumulated technical debts, no one can properly estimate that. And so these projects never get off and typically die during planning/evaluation when both numbers (cost and time) climb higher and higher the longer people think about it.
IMO a solution would be to do it iteratively with a small team and just finish whenever. Upside: you have people who know the system inside-out at hand all the time should something come up. Downside of course is that you have effectively no meaningful reporting on when this thing is finished.
I swear to god, companies are nowadays just picking the solution with the most buzzwords. Any compiler engineering student knows how to write a transpiler from one language to another, while getting this right is a cumbersome task, it still completly automated afterwards. Just hire a few compiler engineering phds and the job is done in at least half a year.
Look what i found after a quick google search:
You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.
You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.
The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.
Also, isn’t COBOL extremely fast ? Which is not necessarily true for newer languages
I think that’s mostly because of the systems COBOL usually runs on, not so much because of the language
Rust: am i a joke to you?
You’re probably thinking of Fortran, which is still used for hardcore number crunching in areas like physics.
Just make the devs learn the language if they don’t know it already. What kind of shitty mid to senior dev can’t learn a new language in a reasonable amount of time.
I think it’s a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it’s C# because they’re C# senior devs. It’s not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other “why we use best practices” raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending. I can only help with so many design standards when you still see everything show up in a classes-and-subclasses mindset with hard-to-catch concurrency bugs. I actually caught a developer trying to spin up a child process to wait on a socket response.
So in FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.
In my experiemce, Java shoots processing usage up while COBOL uses much lesser CPU / memory
I’d be happy if I could land a web dev role for 40k at this point
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.
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 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…
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.
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
The OGs are. The new trainees ain’t.
Which makes sense, but they are still being seriously taken advantage of.
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.
TIL repeating the definition of capitalism is blaming capitalism
It wasn’t capitalists, it was the invisible hand of the market.
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.
