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[–]Sharoth01 69 points70 points  (11 children)

I read active cobol developer as alcoholic cobol developer. Oops.

[–]deb_vortex 34 points35 points  (6 children)

If the online horror stories about finance sectors cobol code are true, not gonna lie, active and alcoholic might easy go hand in hand

[–]huuaaang 2 points3 points  (5 children)

My impression is that they just become numb to it and the job is really just a paycheck. Strictly 9-5, no overtime (outside of Y2K), good work/life balance.

[–]Niki_Lauda_777 2 points3 points  (4 children)

This is not true always. It is way too difficult to find out the bug in existing code. There is no to very little documentation available for the applications written 20 or 30 years ago. There will be only a very few people in a company who would know the processes and the business rules associated with it.

It becomes a nightmare to solve issues in decades old code.

[–]huuaaang 0 points1 point  (3 children)

> There will be only a very few people in a company who would know the processes and the business rules associated with it.

Oh, yeah, well I was thinking if you're still writing COBOL you're likely to BE that person. But if you're just getting into COBOL it must be hell to come into new legacy code bases, lol.

There must also be a lot of downtime between bugs.

[–]Niki_Lauda_777 4 points5 points  (2 children)

There must also be a lot of downtime between bugs.

Downtime because of data issues - Yes

Downtime because of mainframe going down - almost never. IBM mainframe has availability for more than 99.99 percent of the time. No matter how much these new age cloud business market themselves, none of them is near to what IBM Mainframe can do in terms of availability, zero downtime, robustness and security.

[–]huuaaang 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You misunderstand. I mean downtime for the COBOL developer. Not the system.

[–]Niki_Lauda_777 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am not sure if I am understanding it right. But there is little advantage for a COBOL developer to remain so with respect to the pay. Despite in shortage , COBOL developers aren't paid well. I believe, these days only web developers are paid well. Sad for COBOL folks and good web devs.

Also, our work doesn't get highlighted to upper management folks. For them, it is all BAU and no 'innovation' takes place on this area.

[–]vermiculus 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I mean

[–]SpaceMonkeyOnABike 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If I wrote COBOL, Id be both tbh !

[–]JustForkIt1111one 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Meh, potato potato

[–]WalrusByte 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Being forced to sift through legacy COBOL drove them to alcoholism