From when this has come up in the past, it’s a lucrative career path, but probably tricky to break in to since nobody’s maintaining a COBOL system they can afford to put into the hands of someone inexperienced.
The dudes earning half a million are able to do so because they’ve been at it since before their boss was born.
Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn’t the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What’s difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.
Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That’s if/else, loops and similar.
It seems that back in the day, people effectively ran a simple compiler by hand on paper. It could work pretty well; Roller Coaster Tycoon was famously written in assembly.
Well, I only wrote simple exercises in Intel assembly in uni, but there were more of those with AVR assembly.
You can structure things nicely and understandably if you want.
It’s an acquired skill just like many others. Just today writing something big fully in assembly is not in demand, so that skill can usually be encountered among embedded engineers or something like that.
Sorry, I don’t remember what I used then as a tutorial, possibly nothing, and I don’t write assembly often, it was just an opinion based on the experience from the beginning of my comment. That said:
You have call and return, so you can use procedures with return. You have compare and conditional jump instructions. And you have timers and interrupts for scheduling. That allows for basic structure.
You split your program functionally into many files (say, one per procedure) and include those. That allows for basic complexity management.
To use OS syscalls you need to look for the relevant OS ABI reference, but it’s not hard.
So all the usual. Similar to the dumber way of using C.
In general writing (EDIT: whole programs, it’s used all the time in codecs and other DSP, at the very least) in assembly languages is unpopular not because it’s hard, but because it’s very slow.
Once you get into it you’ll wonder how you ever programmed without “divisions”! I mean honestly, just declaring variables anywhere? Who needs that. Give me a nice, defined data division any day 😌
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.
That’s what I was thinking. I moved to Europe and my salary was halved. I’m making 70K euros. After three years of scratching this “living in Europe” itch, I’m ready to move back to the U.S. An entry level developer should be making no less than 90K in the land of the free.
Yep. Few people where I live envy the US, but if you’re a developer the money is no joke. You have to expect that eventually all those big American tech companies will start offshoring, given the crazy money they could save.
I moved from Australia to the USA since salaries for developers are so much higher here. I live in Silicon Valley which helps too. If you’re a senior developer (say 5+ years of experience) then a lot of the large companies here pay $200-300k/year salary plus $100-200k/year in company stock plus a bonus that’s 10-20% of salary if you get a good performance review.
I got lucky since I’ve been into computers and programming since I was 8 years old (late 90s). My first job when I was at school was a part-time developer at a tiny IT company that did consulting work. Since then, all my jobs have been software development jobs.
The fact that it pays well in places like Silicon Valley was a great bonus. I moved here 10 years ago (when I was 23) after I got a job offer, and the starting salary was literally double what I was getting paid in Australia at the time.
The job changes a bit as you get more senior - there’s more mentoring of junior devs, project planning, deciding what your team should focus on, etc. I still spend a lot of my time writing code though, and still enjoy it. :)
There’s some downsides to living in Silicon Valley. A lot of stuff is expensive (that applies for California in general, but especially here). Housing is extremely expensive too.
Okay that is getting up in years. I was about there when I started to get more aggressive with the salary I was asking. You could probably start on the developer I -> developer II -> senior developer career path.
Do you look at other jobs much? Do much networking? Talk to other devs about their salary? Even just grabbing a lunch with some workmates from time to time can help get you in the right mindset of recognising your worth.
In Canada, the Ministry of Health pays colleges to teach kids COBOL and JCL. It’s a steady job, pension, good bennies. I know a handful of people who went that route, rather than the riskier private sector.
Would you happen to know how that compares to saying “Fuck it” and going with a Java career for the relative predictability? I’m not asking for any particular reasons, just curious.
I know some Java folks, but my sampling is biased because I meet them where I work - places that predominantly use the younger languages. Actually, I happen to know that the MoH in particular (and probably lots of other institutions) wrap their COBOL/JCL in a lot of Java, so that most devs never need to dive into the “real backend” if they want to just stay at the Java level.
Java people seem like family people. But from what I’ve observed, their job doesn’t seem any different. You can work in javascript, or python, and still insist on clocking out at 16, 1700. But I only work at startups or seat of your pants kinds of places, so I know about what I hear. 🤷
Doubtful, I was just joking about how it’s an older language that has become rare
Probably a few CS programs offer courses in it, if nothing else because it’s historically important. And I’m sure one could teach it to themself via books and documentation
I once applied for a “database admin” job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically “run all our Oracle databases” and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo’ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)
In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said “if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute”.
Anyways I didn’t get the job, but they’re not all underpaid.
It really wouldn’t be all that bad. If they’re dropping $2m/y on a database admin, then their BCDR plan must be rock solid with crazy fault tolerances. I’d imagine outages are extremely rare.
But, if they’re dropping that kind of money, you’d have to be an expert in the field. Or know someone.
If you labor there’s only two ways you get paid your full worth: you own the means of your production or your boss is a chump. However much the job pays, you are going to have a larger impact than your salary (hopefully).
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.
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