Posted on 04/18/2016 3:09:17 AM PDT by AdmSmith
Mainframe systems are still the backbone of much of today's IT infrastructure. Yet, finding IT talent to maintain these systems, and the COBOL and Fortran languages that support them, is becoming increasingly difficult.
The trouble is that all of the people who know how to maintain these systems -- while preparing to bolt on next-gen apps -- are aging out of the workforce, and there are no Millennials eagerly lining up to take their spots. Mainframes require knowledge of COBOL and Fortran, languages that are not considered particularly sexy these days. It's not hard to see why no one wants to learn these languages. Mainframe is dead. Long live the cloud. Right?
(Excerpt) Read more at informationweek.com ...
A COBOL programmer made so much money doing Y2K remediation that he was able to have himself cryogenically frozen when he died. One day in the future, he was unexpectedly resurrected.When he asked why he was unfrozen, he was told: "It's the year 9999 - and you know COBOL"
My first main-frame experience was in ‘66 with an IBM DCS (direct coupled system), a 7094 doing the crunching at the direction of a 7074 which handled the card readers, card punches, printers and tape drives (800 bpi, wow).
He made a fortune doing COBOL remediation in the time leading up to Y2K. Pretty much could name his price.
Well, this is anecdotal, but I've been working a bunch with a salesweasel on some infrastructure projects. He was complaining the other day about a couple of projects with big (Fortune 500) companies - they're doing some sort of remediation and mainframe consolidation, and he was having a tough time finding qualified bodies for the job.
So.....some random guy in an internet chatroom is telling you that another guy he talked to recently, has some unspecified mainframe projects with certain companies. IF that's not an excellent basis for a career switch, I dunno what is. lol!
But between that, and this article, it sounds like there's some movement in the market. I wonder what's putting the pieces in motion?
interesting
“Seriously, BASIC is one of my favorite languages!”
How I long for a simple PSET command that will put a dot on the screen so you can graph something wthout having to kill yourself.
LOL. I rewrote that for BASIC years ago and added tractor beams and other things. Unfortunately, the only copy was on a 5 1/4 inch disk.
There are quite a few “old dinosaurs” around, and they are not extinct. They remember the “legacy” systems very well. They knew and understood IBM mainframes and their software, and retained their knowledge well into their forced retirement.
They are American. They are not Indian. They have a few gray hairs, but the gray matter under the gray hairs is in great shape, and can crank out reams of “legacy” code if asked.
Back around 2000 US companies started absolutely refusing to hire Americans. Instead they hired Romanians, Russians, Indians, and anyone who wasn’t an American citizen. Many of those new hires didn’t know what they were doing, and often relied on the kindness of the guys with the gray hairs, until the guys with the gray hairs were nowhere to be found!
Notice, yes, but a week or two with practice and she can go for https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/cobol-jobs
“’I hope the accursed punch cards are history...”
Maybe my alphanumeric skills on the IBM 129 card punch will be called for. :-) (the keypad numbers are in reverse top-to-bottom order in keypunch than 10-key)
I know how to operate an electric Burroughs bookkeeping machine too. We did all that stuff in high heels and without any I-phones too.
“many of the old programs are very poorly written; especially if written before the concept of structured programmer were made popular.”
Yes, and there was that matter of the two-character year fields that were used back then.
@masm here (unisys extended mod assembler).
Those were the days, when wasting a single instruction, or blowing your pipeline cache, were considered heretical actions.
Talk about code that blazed!
I remember that game. You ever play “MegaWars” on Comp U Serve?
PL1 was such a huge language.
So different from something like C, which is tiny.
But PL1 was easy and it worked.
Remember the little green pamphlet with all the ASM opcodes listed? :-)
I still have one around here somewhere...
“A good software engineer can write FORTRAN in any language.”
Every computer programmer today calls themselves an “engineer” without knowing anything about engineering or using any engineering principles or having a degree in engineering.
So, true, a software engineer can do FORTRAN, but we only have language specialized programmers these days. Script kiddies.
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