Cobol programmers are either dying or retiring

>cobol programmers are either dying or retiring
Why aren't you learning COBOL?

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csis.ul.ie/cobol/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL
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I don't want to die.

I havent found a tutorial that isnt made by pajeet and my school doednt teach cobol anymore.

Because I see myself as a craftsman and value good tools. Which is kind of unfortunate as a software dev.

>I don't want to start wishing for death
FTFY

noice

>I value good tools.
>Which is kind of unfortunate as a software dev.
And the award for understatement of the year goes to

kek

>learn cobol in spare time while working mcjob
>turn in my resignation 0 days in advance
>any legacy job I want
>300k starting
>leave degreefags in the dust overnight
Is this basically the ideal career path?

I would suspect that you also need more background knowledge, like about mainframes and how banks works and basic accounting and whatnot.

>early graying hair
>MDD and/or alcoholism/drugs within a few years
>goodbye cruel world
>ideal career path

At least once a year, a major tech outlet does a story on how cobol programmers are on the verge dissapearing, and people can earn mega bux if they corner the niche.

These articles were doing the rounds when i got into the industry in about 1998 and nothing at all has changed.

These financial institutions are rich, and they depend on this stuff. The leap to the view that they will pay some autist a shittonne to learn cobol is a nerd fantasy.

They running cobol exclusively for one reason: they will never spend a dollar they aren't forced to.

I've worked with an institution that's "reliant" on cobol. Despite being big enough to own race cars, the sixty year old cobol guy could literally earn more by going and doing some entry level web development. All the computers in his area run Windows 95 for literally no reason other than "we are risk adverse", which is a nice way of management saying "fuck I'm high lol". When he retires, they will get on fiverr and hire Indian contractors. And it will crash down and burn and cost them millions, and they will claim to be victims and do everything but invest in technology.

You aren't going to get a COBOL job by only knowing COBOL. You need previous experience with mainframes in the very least and none of the companies looking for COBOL programmers are willing to train new hires (yet).

>maintain decades worth of spaghetti code written by people who became programmers just for the money
No thanks.

csis.ul.ie/cobol/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuCOBOL

Coding is not that difficult. Like everything, the hard part is understanding customer requirements.

COBOL is a low-entry language.
IBM boasted they could teach COBOL coding in 6 weeks. Suzy and/or Sammy COBOL would come back from their course with their clutch-pencils and cardboard suitcases full of coding manuals, templates and flowcharts and would be put to work writing sub-routines for the Systems Analysts.

This. This is exactly what I expected.

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO-WORLD.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY 'OP is a faggot'.
STOP RUN.

I am. Thank fuck it isn't the 1950s anymore. It might not be so bad if the documentation didn't suck shit.

APPEND POST TO THREAD MOVING THREAD TO PAGE 1

I'm planning on taking Cobol with my roomate next semester. It's offered through our business school

If I were a cobol programmer I would write a forth in cobol

My coworker is having a one month training workshop on cobol because our team took on a mainframe maintenence project. It seens retarded but oh well, I too had to work with microshaft so cant really complain

lol there's a high negative correlation between expertise in COBOL and years of life left

Because COBOL is outdated and the applications written in them have been around for ages. Companies generally need people who can support applications written in COBOL, not write net new COBOL applications or functionality. The trend nowadays is to write APIs that allow developers to interact with COBOL systems via more modern frameworks like JavaScript or .NET (source: I work for a company that uses a billing system written in COBOL, new development is done in .NET core and Angular)

kek

It was made by a woman.

I took a class on this garbage in college back in 1996.

The only time COBOL was useful to me was when the Air Force brought back the SR-71 for a minute beyond that everyone I know is paid nothing to know a language written for suitmen.

Well being a COBOL analyst/developper is my job.
>Because COBOL is outdated
It's not, it's the best language for it's job.
>Companies generally need people who can support applications written in COBOL,
You're right.
>not write net new COBOL applications or functionality.
You're wrong. There are still brand new applications written in COBOL being made today. source: I've been working on one for the last 10 month.
>The trend nowadays is to write APIs that allow developers to interact with COBOL systems via more modern frameworks like JavaScript or .NET
Those only replaced 3270 pages for teleprocessing applications so that end users aren't scared of the mean 8 color text terminals, but use flashy webpages and all. Behind those there are still new services and teleprocessing applications being made nowadays. source : the application mentionned earlier have a couple of teleprocessing services and the only thing that's modern about them is the man-machine interface made in spirit, which only tell IMS on the mainframe to call our transactions, which are written in COBOL.