Will learning COBOL get me a comfy $150k/yr job in some isolated back office where I don't have to do anything but...

will learning COBOL get me a comfy $150k/yr job in some isolated back office where I don't have to do anything but maintain some legacy code?

Other urls found in this thread:

thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/
indeed.com/jobs?q=cobol&l=New York, NY&radius=25
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System
kx.com
twitter.com/AnonBabble

No.

Probably. I know learning Fortran gets you a comfy position at the BLS in DC, assuming you have at least a bachelors (and preferably a masters or doctorate). You will NEVER lose a government job.

I don't know about corporate though. COBOL is a dying breed and more companies every day are just admitting they need to eat a cost and get that legacy code replaced. Get it now, while you can. Because if you can convince a company to hire you, that's a decision of spending $100M on infrastructure or $150k/yr on (you).

nice

Yes, but only IF you can find an opening. It's basically an ultra-legacy language relegated to old-school mainframes, and very few places still use those.

banks. banks and governments and transportation and postal services (where the latter two are not part of the government (anymore))

its also a dead end for your career

Only if you have the required connections, and even then the job won't be too "comfy"
Protip: you don't

a friend of mine learned fortran for shits and giggles, now maintains code at CERN and makes twice what i do
most of their old shit is fortran, and 70 year olds can't be fucked to fiddle with code all day

>comfy
>maintain some legacy code
I don't understand.

>dead end
>$150k

Why do people keep repeating this meme? Yes 10-15 years ago this was true but no first world bank is running shit on a 30 year old mainframe anymore.

Learning COBOL isn't the problem and also probably won't give you a job. The problem is that they want 10+ years experience with the environment: DB2, zOS, VSAM and ideally subject matter experience

Makes sense. The guys I knew were all pulling six figures and they got paid on a salary schedule. So the longer they worked there, the higher their pay was.

>will learning COBOL get me a comfy $150k/yr job

Are you a time traveler from the 70s?

thenextweb.com/finance/2017/04/25/banks-should-let-ancient-programming-language-cobol-die/

COBOL is PHP to the extreme. Its pointless to learn now because you'll never have the experience to maintain legacy projects and obviously nothing new is being built in it

Leave COBOL where it belongs, OP. On an 8" floppy disk in 1981.

Older languages or the ones that have very stable APIs are tough to find jobs if you're a beginner. Stick to the fresh memes like javascript, it's easier to keep up.

$150k/yr is nothing. That's only one step above minimumwagecucking

Not in a long time, user. Spacebars everywhere are sighing with relief.

Yes. Fortran is still viable and being used, COBOL is not.

I have a doctorate but not in CS (business PhD). Are they seriously that desperate for Fortran coders?

Why are you trying to get underemployed?

Speaking of niches, is it worth it to learn Assembly professionally these days?

>Are you a time traveler from the 70s?
COBOL is still the most widely used programming language in the world.
It's running all of the world's core infrastructure, so it's nearly impossible to replace.

I live in a logistics hub, so almost all of the programming jobs are maintaining logistics-oriented software.
The popularity of languages here is Java, COBOL, and C#. In that order. It's fucking crazy.

It's actually gotten to the point where local firms are picking up kids out of the local schools and paying them to learn COBOL.

No, you'll be asked to migrate legacy code from COBOL to something more recent and maintainable.

Can agree, in my country ATMs and banks run at least windows 7 now and some designated shitting software to run on.

indeed.com/jobs?q=cobol&l=New York, NY&radius=25

>Bank of America
>BNY Mellon
>UBS
>Morgan Stanley
>UPS

All of them are in the New York area. All of them are running COBOL applications on state-of-the-art IBM Mainframes.

If you look at any finance or logistics hub, you will find a COBOL job.
If you look for a government job (around DC), you will find a COBOL job.

i imagine there aren't many young programmers that would be interested in cobol though. if anything, those companies will be forced to upgrade their infrastructure somehow. quite challenging.

Have you ever been to a bank? They still have big mainframes after 5 card swipes at the core of the data center. Every transaction goes through there.

actually I found cobol a lot of fun. It has a lot of things built in (like sorting record files, generating reports, pretty printing all kinds of values) that modern languages just don't have. Also, the '85 standard made it a lot easier to write multiple programs and tie them together instead of a monolithic million-liner written via copy/paste. The '12 standard introduced object oriented cobol too, though it's way too verbose for practical use honestly.

Also it's dead simple to read. Like `ADD Sales-Tax TO Sub-Total GIVING Total` type stuff.

New mainframes(the important ones that you won't ever have access to) also run COBOL.

The terminal software runs on winshit, of course.
The actual mainframes run custom shit, like HP NonStop OS or whatever IBM has. And transactions still happen with COBOL programs.
Source: one of my relatives works at one of the companies responsible for this shit

Reminder: COBOL programmers don't want to be replaced, so they tell everyone how shit COBOL is.

Any COBOL implementation from those days is hella outdated; the language has been improved and modernized a couple of times since then.

>New mainframes(the important ones that you won't ever have access to)
Those are the ones where the government stores photos of your genitals that they took with secret cameras while you were using the bathroom at 7-11.

I am serious. Many big companies still use old and new COBOL programs on their mainframes, and it wouldn't make sense to replace most of them

No
I work for a company that still uses COBOL. We're trying to replace it but currently there's still a lot of work being done on the legacy systems.
It's not easy to deal with because there's usually multiple layers sitting between the legacy systems and modern systems.
If something goes wrong it's a pain for all involved to investigate it.
There's also the fact that our stuff is dependent on an emulation layer to actually run, and said layer only runs on certain hardware, so that's two more sources of possible issues.

You're far better off just learning Java or something else that companies are migrating *to* rather than *from*. Yes, Java's here to stay for quite some time, and it's quite popular for backend business stuff. With shit like Node you can't be sure if it will still get you a job in 10 or 20 years (look at where Ruby and others ended up), but Java is the eternal job-getter language.

Military payroll system is from the 40s

>Java
>for actually important shit
lel

Not an argument.
At both my current and previous employer, Java was used for important stuff. I know at my previous job they were switching the HR and Payroll systems from COBOL (I think) to Java, and at my current job they're trying to migrate all COBOL stuff to Java (eventually).

Anyone who says anything along the lines of "real programmers don't do X language" is a tool. Real programmers do whatever gets them a paycheck.

you might not get that upfront depending on where you live. I program in COBOL though and am pretty much guaranteed a career at the company I work for with good vacation days, stock purchase, healthcare, etc. Once you get past the initial difficulty curve - maintaining legacy applications is easy or a challenge if you want it to be.

>HR and Payroll system
>important shit

Which is why I'm huge on Kotlin. All my code can be translated to Java and nobody has to know that it was ever Kotlin to begin with.

Yes, it turns out paying people on time and paying them the correct amount is actually very important.
Not to say they don't have other important systems, but the core systems are still on COBOL and will probably be migrated eventually. To what? Probably Java.

But does the resulting Java end up as maintainable as writing Java to begin with? I ask because we've looked at automated COBOL to Java converters, but they tend to leave it as an unmaintainable mess. It might "work" but our software has lots of ongoing improvements so it needs to be maintainable above all else.

I'm just saying that HR and Payroll systems don't have to be online 24/7. They are not very critical systems. They also very likely don't have high loads

Yes, because Kotlin is 100% interopable with Java. That's how the language is designed.

unironically yes. one of the worst corporate programming fads (extreme programming) was born in the ashes of Chrysler's failed attempts to develop a payroll system

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensation_System

if you can handle sources that look like matrix-code, K is the language that runs Wall Street

provided you can get in

>K is the language that runs Wall Street
[citation needed]

kx.com

k is mainly used for financial organisation where they need billions of data processed stat and where kdb is several magnitudes faster than normie sql solutions

No, expect 70k-90k a year near the coasts.

Might. Although losing your mind and soul is a guarantee.

Not much except for developing OS kernels. Assembly for application software is kinda pointless because modern compilers are so good and all you're really doing with asm programming is calling up OS library functions while using the asm code to perform calculations and whatnot, so at that point you may as well use a HLL anyway.

>70-90k near the coasts
so, homelessness?