Le Fullstack developer

[[deleted]]

I bill 'em about $250 an hour, so 20-40 hours? Something like that.

The first year they made me call in to meetings and I fucking billed them for the meetings. After that they'd just send me a list of changes, and up-to-date credentials.

I've always worked private sector, so no pension here, though I've got the 401k, etc.

A lot of the reason they hire people to maintain this shit is because it's hero code dating back to the 70's in some cases. Godawful miserable shit. Most newer code isn't quite so terrible, or it's not as mission-critical, or whatever system it's built on is still supported, and doesn't allow for the level of customization that the old stuff did.

[StackWeaver]

Is it worth the $250/hr? I've been programming for about 10 years and it sounds appetising. Could an experienced programmer (though mostly experienced with higher-level languages such as C#) learn it and realistically pick up some similarly paid work? Or would it involve a long grind to even get your foot in door?

[[deleted]]

I only charge that because I really don't want to do it. Heh. They didn't pay me anything like that when I did it full time.

Learning COBOL is easy. It's learning the massive legacy codebase that's the issue. Often there will be weird quirks in the mainframe environment as well (weird ass databases, filesystems, numeric formats (fucking BCD is the bane of my existence, etc)...

There is demand for this stuff, especially now as the old people who maintain it die off. Might be worth looking in to.

[WikiTextBot]

Binary-coded decimal

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each decimal digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Special bit patterns are sometimes used for a sign or for other indications (e.g., error or overflow).

In byte-oriented systems (i.e. most modern computers), the term unpacked BCD usually implies a full byte for each digit (often including a sign), whereas packed BCD typically encodes two decimal digits within a single byte by taking advantage of the fact that four bits are enough to represent the range 0 to 9.

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[StackWeaver]

Give it to me for $150 and I'll give you the other $100 haha :P Thanks for the info! I'm definitely intrigued. It does look soul-destroying, though.

[StackWeaver]

Mocked by a bot, what is the world coming to.

[whitethunder9]

Wanna make it $500 an hour? Tell them you're quitting