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fibojoly ,

That’s because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them “yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you”. Here in Europe, they’ll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you’ve got a grateful new dev who doesn’t know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.

Swedneck ,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

programmers desperately need to unionize

fibojoly ,

For real. Even just talking to your fellow coding monkeys helps. It’s ironic that for example here in France, despite all our workers rights and revolutionary tradition, speaking about your salary is still a social faux-pas. And who benefits? Certainly not us.

andioop ,

I’d understanding actively pressuring someone to share their salary being a faux-pas. Admittedly, just sharing your own may make some people feel pressured to share theirs out of reciprocity, but just sharing your own salary generates nowhere near the same amount of pressure as outright telling someone “share your salary or you’re a bad person on the side of The Man!”

I hope the amount of people sharing their salary increases and talking about it becomes normalized.

Asafum ,

Man I’d swim to Europe if some company wants to swoop me up and train me for something that valuable lol here in the States I have to not only pay for the training out the nose, but also find the time to do that while still working my regular job lol

fibojoly ,

Well, you could do like many US people and visit Ireland, I suppose :)

cocobean ,

A surprising number of people don’t know about levels.fyi

Go to levels.fyi, find some companies and compare at your level. For a long time I was like “ain’t no way these numbers are accurate, people are getting paid that much?” YES THE NUMBERS ARE ACCURATE; your company’s excuses for a shitty raise this year (“blah blah market conditions, blah blah you are already on the upper end of your band, let’s work on a promotion next year”) are bullshit.

AngryCommieKender ,

I wish they would include the “non-professional” professions. I bet I could have gotten a better pay as a chef if I had any idea what other chefs made at the time.

Liz ,

Does Glass Door have non-office jobs listed? I haven’t looked on there in quite a while but it was the same idea in a more general sense.

AngryCommieKender ,

I don’t know. They want me to sign up before I’m allowed to look at anything.

portside ,

Sadly this doesn’t include my profession (Industrial Automation). Do you know of other alternatives?

cocobean ,

You could try Glassdoor, but my understanding is that it’s not as accurate as levels.

victorz ,

Honestly not the right format for that meme template lol. The monkey should represent one person doing both looks.

Dazawassa ,
@Dazawassa@programming.dev avatar

I thought everyone kind of knew this. And then the PCMag article dropped.

ocassionallyaduck ,

Yo if you are doing COBOL systems maintenance for 90k you arent charging enough.

That’s all this meme means. Consultants on COBOL maintenance can make 90k in a week. This is not the area where companies pinch pennies.

massive_bereavement ,
@massive_bereavement@kbin.social avatar

My experience with Fintech and the financial sector is that they don't care about how much, they only care about how fast.

rottingleaf ,

They just have understanding of correct criteria of financial success, since they, eh, work with finances.

odium ,

A lot of banks have bootcamps where they pick up unemployed people who might not have ever had tech experience in their life. They teach them COBOL and mainframe basics in a few months, and, if they do well, give them a shitty $60k annual job.

Source: know someone who went to one of these bootcamps and now works for a major us bank.

Soulg ,

So you’re saying you can get free training then just leave for a real paying company eh

Asafum ,

I imagine they have some absurd contract that says they can’t leave for 89 years or whatever

SmoothIsFast ,

And I’d like to see that contract hold up in court lol

DragonTypeWyvern ,

The trick to exploiting people is keeping them in fear and ignorance.

mcmoor ,

And people wonder why companies dont train undergrads anymore

SmoothIsFast ,

Oh, no, educated workers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe companies should value their employees if you want company loyalty.

mcmoor ,

Oh no, job providers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe people should value their job providers if you want their loyalty.

spoilerMy time on Lemmy (and Reddit before) ironically make me appreciate communism less and less

Daft_ish ,

Won’t someone think of the Job providers?! How will they ever afford their third yacht. Damn communists.

^^^this is you^^^^

Takumidesh ,

I code one feature for my job in a sprint and it becomes a value generator for a decade, making the companies hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

Software developers create value out of thin air for companies, value that management and leadership is unable to generate.

SmoothIsFast ,

Lmao alright bud go fire all your employees and see how you do. Then you will understand who needs to be loyal to who.

Nollij ,

There are some court cases going on right now about this type of thing. Generally, the payback is only allowed to be for the real cost of training, and only for a few years. So that 60k salary for 3 years is also the right amount to make you worth 150k anywhere else.

djehuti ,

This has been going on for decades. My dad became a COBOL programmer in 1980ish after taking an aptitude test in answer to a newspaper ad. Y2K consulting was a pretty good gig.

nqgrl ,

I think some COBOL consultants are very well paid, especially since they are a rare breed.

tty5 ,

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.

Unforeseen ,

Hmm I have the AIX half of that. Maybe learning COBOL is worth the pain…

Kata1yst ,
@Kata1yst@kbin.social avatar

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.

Unforeseen ,

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

tty5 ,

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.

fibojoly ,

The OGs are. The new trainees ain’t.
Which makes sense, but they are still being seriously taken advantage of.

Th4tGuyII ,
@Th4tGuyII@kbin.social avatar

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

aksdb ,

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.

frobeniusnorm ,

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.

Look what i found after a quick google search:

yggdar ,

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.

BestBouclettes ,

Also, isn’t COBOL extremely fast ? Which is not necessarily true for newer languages

ignotum ,

Rust: am i a joke to you?

Hawk ,

I think that’s mostly because of the systems COBOL usually runs on, not so much because of the language

CanadaPlus ,

You’re probably thinking of Fortran, which is still used for hardcore number crunching in areas like physics.

jaybone ,

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.

abraxas ,

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.

hperrin ,

Something that maybe a software engineer union could solve.

WhatAmLemmy ,

Something that a union would definitely solve. What are the banks gonna do? Fire every veteran and hire a team of underpaid newbs to manage their critical systems? If they were dumb enough to do that, let them save themselves millions a year by facing billions in losses… I’m sure that’ll work out well.

bearwithastick ,

Banks: Hold my beer!

And later blame it on the workers that unionized.

aksdb ,

It only needs to work long enough for the current management to cash in on their savings. Then it’s their successors problem.

r00ty Admin ,
r00ty avatar

The thing is, this type of job never needed a union previously. It was niche enough for a long time, that you were sought out and rewarded well. But yes, I think we're moving into an era where we do need union representation.

Oddly enough, with my experience I am sought out still. Just for bizarre startups who clearly never checked my previous work history. Some of the messages I get on Linkedin for example are just weird requests.

PhlubbaDubba ,

If only there was one, I wish I had one just so I wouldn’t have to do all the fucking social hoops just to get my resume noticed by an actual human before the HR’s “I don’t want to do my job!” machines filter me out for not going to an Ivy League School like apparently everyone else did.

HairHeel ,
@HairHeel@programming.dev avatar

Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more

RedWizard ,
@RedWizard@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Something a union could solve…

hperrin ,

Yes, workers unions are famous for fighting to lower the wages of the workers they represent. Very much. Indeed.

HairHeel ,
@HairHeel@programming.dev avatar

I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.

Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.

Potatos_are_not_friends OP ,

Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.

pcmag.com/…/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson

Nighed , (edited )
@Nighed@sffa.community avatar

The historic high salary for COBOL Devs etc is also partially due to them mostly being old and extremely experienced senior devs

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