With the new AI integration, you can get smart isEven results that return the correct answer 90% of the time and a more creative solution 20% of the time.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
Behind every ❗️❗️❗️🚨🚨🚨URGENT🚨🚨🚨❗️❗️❗️ there is a person who’s about to miss a deadline and, instead of working on themselves to prevent that from happening in the future, makes it the developer’s deadline to miss
I’m in my first professional role and the first project was completed and aside from my boss I was the only other dev. So I was naturally excited for their (clients) feedback on it.
Well fast forward a couple of months where they really didn’t interact with the application much and then came the queries and then not understanding how to use it. Find boss sets aside 10 days for me to write some documentation with screenshots of all the journeys (free of charge).
Again, tumbleweeds. Then all of a sudden it’s boom emails a plenty.
Can you fix this, this is a major bug kinda emails. Like it isn’t a bug, you don’t know how to use it.
Now we are dumbing down the software to make it more align with what the business is used to, which is fine but even my boss has said (as I over think and want to reply to things instantly) that just because they have come to life doesn’t mean we drop everything else to tend to them now.
that just normal software development with contacts and waterfall. usually with agile it’s meditated to some extend, because with agile the customer is on board and cannot say afterwards i didn’t want it.
Welcome to the professional world where everything is iterative and and 95% of your clients (internal or external) are data illiterate and don’t want to learn whatever self service tools you build.
Yeah it’s going to wild I can already tell. I know your right to as it’s only a small company I work for, less than 10 of us and they all complain about stupid things the clients do.
I have a colleague who is the contact for a dude that takes a picture of a site with his phone, so he photographs the monitor. Which I know isn’t that unusual, but wait.
He then emails this to himself, perhaps to have it on his desktop. Proceeds to print off the image, but not just the image, but the image as it appears in the email. THE ACTUAL EMAIL.
Then he will annotate the printout and I shit you not, will take another photo, but this time of the printout. Inception level shit.
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.
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.
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.
I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.
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