I recently heard people saying that if you want the actual big stacks in coding you need to learn old programming languages so you get hired by wealthy institutions like banks for any salary you desire since everyone who knows it is fading away and their old systems rely on it. Is it true? Should I really start learning languages like COBOL and others and then demand an insane salary? Or is it just a meme?
Oh and I'm not talking about cobol specifically just old language like that. I think fortran is another
sure
check your local listings if see how many opportunities there are. companies generally aren't gonna let you work from home.
pay is high because both the job availability and dev pool is low. but that also means that it's more competitive for the remaining jobs that there are.
Depends. Some old languages could be worth it. Learning COBOL now is like learning typewriters. Tells. A lot about how retarded you would be. You're supposed to be the person that have a vision and improves the system, not the person that continues to fill the bag of shit, and if you need an employer, they're certainly comprehensive considering it has to do with their money.
Except COBOL is still the backbone of the financial system and will remain so for the near future
COBOL developers are retiring and there's still a big demand for new ones
Yeah, but COBOL only pays well if you're a boomer that's been doing it for a long time. If you learn COBOL to replace them, expect to get half as much as a webdev while dealing with brain melting ancient codebases.
I'm going to be getting 80k in a few months as a junior COBOL dev, full work from home. Excited for a life so comfy.
How do you do cobol from home?
git, i would expect
My networking+ professor recently suggested this
Why network+? What did he recommend
>Is it true?
Somewhat but entirely. Working with ancient programming languages also usually means working with ancient libraries, ancient build tools, ancient development environments, ancient documentation, ancient computers, ancient ancient etc.
Imagine it's 50 years from now, Python is dead and most former Python developers are retired. Should be easy to take their place. But Python isn't just Python, it's also pip and anaconda and numpy and django and pytest and poetry and C++ and Windows and Unix and Docker and Jenkins and everything else you take for granted now, but will it all be easily accessible and well documented in 2073?
https://www.ibm.com/products/cobol-compiler-zos
If you wanna go for it go for it. I'm not trying to dissade you, I'm just saying it's not gonna be as trivial as picking up a new programming language over the weekend.
all i'm saying is that it's still actively developed and in use
It's actively maintained in the same way an embalmed corpse is actively maintained
new features are constantly being added. why is it so important for you to lie about cobol? are you just that ignorant?
Another problem with working on dead legacy languages, you're also inadvertently joining a cult.
>dead legacy languages
you retarded-ass nagger, i've already proven twice that cobol is far from dead. you're just a contrarian homosexual dialating all over the thread.
so is fortran
https://fortran-lang.org/
>accessible and well documented in 2073
yes, it will be, just by the fact that financial institutions are dependent on it. and by those institutions, i mean the most important companies that make the world function today, and not the likes of google or facebook.
cobol is robust and optimized in what it specifically needs to do, like fixed precision calculations. it's a prime example of "don't fix what ain't broke."
and why the fuck are we talking about 50 years from now. do you expect people talking in this thread to literally be 'senior' developers by then?
an entire tech ecosystem exists around cobol today, you just don't hear about it in the news because it's boring and not as fancy as 'web3' or the latest js framework. calling cobol 'ancient' in context other than its syntax and age is peak dunning-kruger.
>frog
Opinion discarded.
but can you discard your dunning-kruger?
COBOL is so old that its creator died of old age well before 90% of this board was born.
and it will continue to exist long after everyone in this thread is dead.
I thought there are jobs that are designed solely to move away from cobol into a newer language?
you move legacy projects from X to Y only if you have really good reasons for it, like "X is slow and doesn't scale well"
but even if banks have good reasons, they are running complex systems. we're talking about banks here, which can move millions dollars per day, internationally. a single bug could theoretically transfer millions of dollars to some hobo's savings account on the other side of the world.
it's a lot safer for them to just to train or shit out better pay for devs than to migrate their systems.
also
>https://medium.com/@alxdubov/the-failure-of-the-banking-system-to-migrate-from-cobol-is-a-complex-issue-with-many-factors-7189279d7181
*Somewhat but not entirely
*ancient computers, etc.
cobol is massively in demand from banking companies. Mainly because it was used by boomers to setup monolithic type architecture that costs too much to replace, and everyone younger didn't want to learn it, so when the boomers retire, they need newbies to come in.
It's not that everyone younger didn't want to learn it, it's that the boomers who built and maintained those systems held on to those jobs for life and never trained replacements.
My mom studied COBOL and Pascal in the late 80s and graduated to find that no one was hiring for those jobs because every bank had a captive COBOL goblin already. So she just became an insurance salesman in said.
s/in said/instead
i need to stop day drinking
Yes and no.
The COLBOL jobs around my area will only hire you as a contractor if you're young. Usually the contracts only last 3 months, but pay well. A friend of mine did one for a state government on the east coast to pay off credit card debt.
The full-time positions are way harder to get because the market is full of turbo-boomers with more work experience than you have life experience. Your life would probably suck doing that full-time anyway because of the ancient environment.
So, should I bother learning an old language like cobol, Fortran, etc or just learn a modern language and get a job at FAANG or some other high paying tech company? I've also heard that you need YEARS of experience with those old languages to even try to get a job with them.
again, check your local listings (or areas where you can work to), see how many are junior openings, check the pay. then compare the dinosaurs to the cool webdev gangs.
nobody here can give you a blanket advice, especially if the only opening in your area is the town bank that pays milk money.
i expect that it's hard to get your foot in the door somewhere so you can get mainframe experience for a few years developing cobol.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cobol+jobs&oq=cobol+jobs&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l9.4955j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ibp=htl;jobs&rciv=jb<ype=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7_paby6OBAxU-IDQIHXB_CPcQiJcCKAJ6BAgaEBU#htiltype=1&sxsrf=AB5stBjpCxL96z8u22o6rPQrQ3d-3F0dGA:1694470687283&htivrt=jobs&fpstate=tldetail&htidocid=G48CnBSwNnJDgI1UAAAAAA%3D%3D
then again
https://www.popup-mainframe.com/
Didn't cobol get an update in like 2019? It's still used at airports.
No.
These companies are making their boomers train ai to replace them
All the red words in pic related are keywords. COBOL was designed by a woman and it shows. Even when writing programs they need to talk when there's nothing to say.
the whole point of the language was that it could be written by accountants, etc. instead of programmers, so that makes perfect sense.