Timeline for How to attract people to work on very old and outdated technologies?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
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| Jul 7, 2018 at 12:16 | comment | added | Fattie | exactly as @L0j1k says. Some of the stuff on this page is totally remarkable coming from actual programmers - anyone who's done one unit of basic computer science at a bad local college, knows there is utterly no difference between all programming languages. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of comp sci must know that you can construct any abstraction from a trivial set of commands. Strange QA. | |
| Jul 7, 2018 at 7:34 | comment | added | L0j1k | This is not true about COBOL. Obviously offering more pay will get you more opportunities, but COBOL actually has a cult following among younger programmers, and some of them are really good programmers. I know this because I was offered a job writing COBOL last year and started digging into it to give it a try and see how I felt writing and trying to think in COBOL, so I interacted with the community. You read right: There's a COBOL community! Not only that, but CS students are aware that COBOL jobs exist and can pay a lot more than other kinds of programming. Don't dismiss it so lightly! | |
| Jul 6, 2018 at 14:07 | comment | added | Fattie | The idea that COBOL is a "dead end" is bizarre. Swift is a deadend. Go is a deadend. Remember how cool and new objective-C was? Lol. Moreover, as Dank points out correctly, COBOL is a >>> HUGE <<< field. It's totally bizarre that any working programmer would not realize the floods, avalanches, of money you can make working on the MOST LUCRATIVE SYSTEMS ON EARTH (which are of course in Cobol). Where have you been? | |
| Jul 6, 2018 at 11:15 | comment | added | user48276 | I would strongly challenge this assertion that COBOL is dead or a dead end technology. Its definitely not a growth tech and the skillset wont transfer to Silicon Valley but there are still a ridiculous amount of large fortune-500 companies married to mainframe. The insurance and banking sectors alone could keep a developer employed for the next 25 years. As long as there exist massive amounts of big data calculations that need to be processed overnight, mainframe will continue to stick around. | |
| Jul 6, 2018 at 9:02 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | Well known parody If Carpenter Were Hired Like Software Developers, where the client goes with the car salesman for carpentry, instead of the carpenter, because the car salesman has more experience in brown cars than the carpenter in brown woods. TL;DR: programming is programming, the thought process is harder to cultivate than the language peculiarities. | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 18:24 | comment | added | Mark Plotnick | To add another dimension to this: not all companies that use cobol are like OP's clients who never want to change - many actively want to convert their legacy programs to a more modern and popular language. I think this market will only get bigger over the next decade. Hiring polyglot programmers who are willing to learn cobol will let an outsourcing company crack this market. | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 14:19 | comment | added | AmiralPatate |
@immibis the job will probably be quite boring YKMMV, some people legitimately like the challenge of fighting against byzantine decades-old code. Being able to maintain old apps is valuable, non-IT companies will routinely use old apps because it works and making new ones isn't their core business. I think that's something you might be able to sell, but if we're honest that railroads you into a rather narrow field.
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| Jul 5, 2018 at 13:07 | comment | added | emory | @gazzz0x2z jail might be a problem, but it should not be. With proper code review, it should be impossible to sneak in backdoor code. If OP is throwing arbitrary barriers to entry, then s/he gets no sympathy from me. The former director of the FBI said that he could not get enough software developers working for the FBI, but the FBI won't hire anyone 35+. As a 40+ person, I say eff them. | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 7:07 | comment | added | gazzz0x2z | @Magisch : if customers are banks, people out of jail might be a problem. Other alternative target groups, OTOH, might be interesting. | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 5:01 | comment | added | Alan Campbell | A senior person, not too far from retirement? A junior developer, willing to Learn COBOL? Staff with a technical background, who may have been laid off as redundant? Looking to top up their retirement funds? Hey, that's me! Where is this job listed...? | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 3:45 | comment | added | rooby | One of the key parts of this answer is money. Pay enough money and they will come. | |
| Jul 5, 2018 at 0:25 | comment | added | Criticizing Israel not allowed | You don't have to be a COBOL Developer to work in COBOL. And having worked in COBOL does not make you a COBOL Developer, it just means you have some (mostly useless) experience with COBOL. However the job will probably be quite boring and with no real chance for advancement (as you get when working on modern technology), and you should expect to have to compensate developers for that. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 21:41 | comment | added | wavemode |
and tell them they are expected to learn COBOL, not know it. is probably a key here. Even if I wanted to start a career in COBOL today, I would consider it impossible since I would think every company requires 10 years of experience in the language. Maybe don't even title the job opening "COBOL Developer" but rather "Software Developer" so more people will look at it and actually consider it.
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| Jul 4, 2018 at 19:35 | comment | added | Braiam | @Kakturus you forgot the other reason: the company itself dies. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 15:53 | comment | added | Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen | @Kakturus True. I misread what you wrote. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 15:51 | comment | added | Kakturus | @Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "Dead end", not "dead". And that it is. There are no new commercial projects using COBOL. And the maintenance will only be needed and paid for until the companies eventually move to more modern tech. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 14:47 | comment | added | Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen | COBOL is primitive but not dead. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 12:54 | comment | added | Magisch | The way I've seen other companies go about it is to offer this to underserved groups of people, e.g. people out of jail or recovering addicts. They're likely to have fewer options and more likely to jump on something like this. | |
| Jul 4, 2018 at 12:32 | history | answered | gnasher729 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |