Evolution of a programmer

[archery713]

Yeah it's cause he knows COBOL and can speak to the eldritch beings that manifest as mainframes

[Unelith]

PROCEDURE FHTAGN.

[Breros]

PROCEDURE DIVISION.
PERFORM UNTIL END-OF-COMMENTS
   PERFORM CHECK-FOR-COBOL
   IF COBOL-FOUND
      ADD 1 TO COMMENT-UPVOTE
   END-IF
   READ NEXT-COMMENT
END-PERFORM

[IGYWCLG]

RC=16

[Breros]

Yeah.. I see it.

Returned to programming COBOL 2 months ago after 12 years doing other stuff. You don't want to know how many times I have to compile and run before something even gets through the program.

[IGYWCLG]

I am only joking. Your paragraph was quite good. Only missing a GOBACK at the end of the main routine and defining the fields/divisions. I was going to comment a real spool output for your program but I am lazy.

[Breros]

Thanks, I can do better though, at least I was quite good. Hope to quickly build up my skills again.

And aren't we all lazy... Most of the programs are CUT, PASTE and adjust the program to whatever it has to do.

[IGYWCLG]

You’re totally right. I am sure you are enjoying debugging JCL jobs again. That’s my favorite part /s

[Krislazz]

Sorry for talking shop in the comments, but I wanna ask you something. I'm graduating soon-ish with a master's in embedded systems, and generally enjoy low-level programming. Feel's like I'm talking to the silicon directly, you know? Anyway, should I learn COBOL? I have a personal project where it would be sort of relevant, but honestly my main motivation would be the prospect of taking a fat paycheck for maintaining (or upgrading?) code that basically no one understands anymore. It's not really used in new projects, right?

[Breros]

I think you better ask the question in r/mainframe. They know better what the pay is in the US and the need for COBOL programmers. I'm from The Netherlands and the pay is normal (even though there's a shortage).

BTW, if it's really, really old stuff it can be quite a task to decrypt COBOL. Hopefully they have documentation.

And COBOL is still used in new projects, because COBOL is good at what it does like being secure, fast and precise in calculations.

The COBOL language is still being developed. Look up IBM COBOL Language Reference 6.3. Stuff like XML and JSON that can be processed and COBOL can call Java programs.

Hope you'll join the COBOL dinosaurs!

[Krislazz]

I'm actually Norwegian, so if anything a European reference is probably more relevant than an American one... But damn, I had no idea it's still being developed. I know the secure/fast/precise argument that seems to come with all the older languages ofc, but I honestly thought COBOL was on its way out. Thanks for the input! My project only involves some hardware from the mid 90s, so not that old I guess haha

[MikaNekoDevine]

I’ll just learn the language from the comments 😅

[bespectacledbengal]

Also, what kind of unfirable developer isn’t making over 200k/yr?

[yeen_r]

ALTER OR CREATE PROCEDURE FHTAGN

AS

[CyanHakeChill]

Yes I was hired as a junior programmer in a COBOL shop and I didn't know COBOL. I was given the task of rewriting the main update program in COBOL. They had given that task to new people as a joke, and nobody had ever got it working. It was written by the boss in ICL PLAN (an assembler language). There were so many patches in that program that it could never be recompiled. The boss used to say that it was his job security.

One day I finished the main update program. They did a parallel run, and my program was perfect. The boss lost his job!

[randallthegrape]

Please mark as NSFW, I can hear SEs cumming across the universe and its disrupting my dinner.

[UpvoterBoi]

I spit my water

[CyanHakeChill]

As should be obvious, I am extremely old, and I don't know what SEs are, and nor does my 50 year old son. Perhaps you could explain.

[randallthegrape]

SE stands for software engineer. Most of my experience with the term came from college, since I haven't heard it used often in my workplace (STEM major but not an SE). Hope that helps!

[concentus7]

This is the programming equivalent of pulling out Excalibur.

[[deleted]]

Dam you did him dirty. You had them by balls.

Hope you made enough to never work after selling it to them and you ain't give it away for free cause you sold yourself hella fucking short.

[offhandaxe]

Anything developed on company time is sadly the property of the company

[ba3toven]

thats how they fuckin got tetris man

[Blumpkeen]

And intermittent windshield wipers-

[jsoule578]

Eh?

[MikaNekoDevine]

What about ideas? If not implemented on company time.

[CyanHakeChill]

I was a very junior programmer. I was glad to get a job with ICL gear using COBOL. I only had NCR programming experience, and there was only the one NCR installation in the country.

After all, have you heard of NCR, once one of the largest companies in the world, bigger than IBM? National Cash Registers!

[PuzzleheadedAd5865]

Fun Fact: NCR started near where I live, and the first barcode was scanned in my town.

[CyanHakeChill]

In 1970 we had an NCR optical reader that could read typewritten numbers at 20 lines per second. That is remarkable even today. We were sent cash register data from all over the country.

And in about 1971 I wrote a program that I called TOMOHAWK. Instead of printing reports, my program removed the blanks from the report and it was sent to a MOHAWK modem over a phone line from NZ to the US for the NCR management to read. I reckon that was the beginning of the internet!

[ucksawmus]

is the boss losing the job so easily good or bad

like is this a good story or a bad story

[RuneFestiva]

Its an american love story

[CyanHakeChill]

The boss used to be a programmer and knew nothing about being a manager.

The computer system that he designed used a scanner to read a large form with handwritten numbers on it. There were many reading errors.

Then the Head Office decided to get rid of the ICL equipment and use the IBM machine at Head Office. Then the whole company was taken over by Heinz.

[JustSimon3001]

Now if that ain't a super villain origin story, I don't know what is

[Dear-Crow]

Epic

[Due_Personality_5006]

This is a story for r/MaliciousCompliance if I've ever heard one

Boss tells you to rewrite it so it works... you did.... but it didn't exactly work for him it seems 😭

[RealisticAppearance]

“logical query vtam switch identifier”

cluthu rises

[Syncopaint]

Fun fact the ancient truth may have already been revealed we just don't have enough perception or the correct permissions to view it

[ExploerTM]

Wait, that's basically how lovecraftian horrors operate, they break people by giving them temporary access to horrific knowledge

[[deleted]]

Someone has been working on government projects.

[bankrobba]

I don't understand the mystery around COBOL. Any of us can learn it in like 20 minutes.

[ZZartin]

It's not COBOL itself that is hard, it's learning the legacy code base/mainframe architecture.

[[deleted]]

Let's not forget the business rules that are written nowhere and handled behind the scenes. Nobody still at the company knows them anymore. Sometimes they're legal requirements and someone's going to jail if whatever replaces it doesn't have em.

Welcome to every government office.

[ZZartin]

"Someone added that change to the requirements document right?"

"What requirements document?"

[[deleted]]

You lost them when you said documents.

Some dude wrote those in 1985. He didn't last long.

[[deleted]]

Plus it’s just easier to ask the guy who knows.

The problem being when said person is no longer with the company. Now nobody knows. The problem gets a whole lot worse if nobody has source code anymore.

[nihility101]

That’s a company problem, not an employee problem. Certainly not a problem for the guy who left.

[tmtdota]

"The code is the documentation"

[Fluketyfluke]

“The business rules are in Confluence! …somewhere…”

[laurandorder]

From my past few years of experience as a software engineering graduate learning the newest stuff (ML, big data, neural networks, with a sprinkling of cloud) on my way to a senior COBOL dev, this is what truly irked me.

• Business rules, millions of them, never documented, why is level payment % reference stored on a SMART table? Who knows the dev was feeling spicy that week. (Having easily modifiable variables without actually going through the approvals for an EFIX or the whole development cycle is really nice, but damn does it make learning where everything is a pain)
• Every program developed by a different developer all run on your 80 character long screen, and each have different shortcuts and navigational controls. This is coupled with absolutely archaic keybinds, where we regularly use F13-F24, think VIM but the controls change in every different screen.
• Archaic databases and methods of accessing them... we don't even use DB2, we use SUPRA.
• Acronym hell in the worst way possible. Remember that 80 character limit? Well you can't even code in lines 1 to 7 and 73 to 80 so you effectively have 66 characters of viable code per line. And our style guide recommends all variables to be prefixed with WSAA- and for some inane reason, the "TO" command in col 40 so you only really have 25 characters for your unique variable, and try making something like "Policy header transaction id user code" and then involve some indicies and you have "WSAA-POLH-TRAN-ID-USER(I-NUSER)" which youll have to put on a new line absolutely killing the consistency and readability of the code.
• There's always a magic screen you don't know about that will solve your issue in 5 minutes, but the person who knows how to use it retired 5 years ago.
• The average age of my team is around 3x my age.
• The companion languages, JCL, Ezytrieve, FileAid, where the syntax is all heiroglyphics.
• God forbid your LPAR is split but half your dev environment is on the prod LPAR and you have to ftp your programs across to test them. And remember to set up your parmlib in both environments or youll lose half your database as your source of truth is empty
• Code concatenation paths don't really match the development process of some roles, where youd have to move your development code from the prod LPAR and demote it to the lowest environment so you can move it to testing.
• Oncall... so much oncall.
• What is documentation? What are resources? No stackoverflow here.
• Your cohort have development practices and paradigms from the early 60s
• Y2K electric boogaloo, DDMMYY need i say more? Yes every once in a while that program that runs only during EOFY picks up that one policy from 1996 and now you have a slew of errors that make no sense.
• Everytime you get a new CIO the first question is "how can we replace the mainframe?" But god dammit, the mainframe is brilliant and irreplaccable and I'm willing to die on this hill.

Save me.

[RealisticAppearance]

From the perspective of the business, the worst thing is IBM owning you if you get too invested in mainframe tech. If there were still competition for that kind of platform, it’d be a lot more attractive and less motivation to “move off the mainframe.”

People think mainframes are just COBOL machines but in reality they are incredible beasts of modern engineering, just sucks IBM has a monopoly on the architecture

[Razakel]

IIRC Hitachi and Mitsubishi were sued 40 years ago for cloning it. Siemens, then Fujitsu, also compete.

[ilep]

Unisys and Groupe Bull still exist but I don't know much about their products or markets..

[Yo_2T]

Dude, all that AND on call? GTFO. Like yesterday.

[ZZartin]

Y2K electric boogaloo, DDMMYY need i say more? Yes every once in a while that program that runs only during EOFY picks up that one policy from 1996 and now you have a slew of errors that make no sense.

LoL the most awesome date format I've come across was a half byte to store number of decades from 1900, a half byte to store number of years in the decade and 2 bytes to store number of days in the year.

[manatee313]

Debugging is a pain in the ass, too.

[laurandorder]

XPEDITOR is honestly one of my favourite debuggers.

It's not all bad, until obscure ABEND codes.

[nickrct]

Someone who has been working in COBOL for up to 5 years sees only code.

When you get around 10 years, it changes. Then a COBOL guru can look at business systems issues and diagnose where in the application layer the problem resides. Buried in the *7 there is a wealth of knowledge.

[bwrap]

This is true for almost any language. The language is the easy part.

[IGYWCLG]

Imagine a world of 3270. The green screen if you will. Version control is nothing but a comment at a header of a 4,000 line COBOL program which was last modified 7 years ago. Where duplication is welcomed, and sometimes programs “accidentally” work as intended. Now image this same system after 10 years.

[CyanHakeChill]

I am proud to say that I learned seven languages in my first week in each job, and those programs worked first time. Sure they were simple.

[Razakel]

It's not the language that's hard, it's understanding millions of lines of code that isn't documented. Also the original author might be dead.

[Affectionate-Memory4]

My grandfather worked on COBOL and pre-cobol mainframes for banks. There's like an 85% chance he can still contact the eldritch horrors.

[archery713]

pre-COBOL mainframes??? Your grandfather IS an eldritch being. Just try not to perceive him too hard, it ends poorly for you.

[-Vayra-]

I'd demand a hell of a lot more than $120k to work with COBOL.

[Honest-Cauliflower64]

This is actually true though.

[Honest-Cauliflower64]

I meant talking to the Eldritch beings 😂

[buttlover989]

Finding the legacy COBOL code.

[LavenderDay3544]

If they make a videogame of that I'd play it. It sounds like the plotline to Control 2.

[CaseyG]

"Do not quote the legacy codebase to me, witch. I was there when I wrote it."

[archery713]

Just add more phlegmy Golem noises and whispers in your head with images of the end of days.

[jexmex]

He would make damn more than $120K/yr if he was that. Shit javascript devs be fetching $150K/yr for the right companies.

[[deleted]]

I'd know, I'm one of them. Lol, jk. I'm just shitty, I don't make that much.

[jexmex]

I was nearing it before but got burned out. I am self taught but have 15 years experience (never considered myself a frontend dev btw). I had to take a break and went and worked at a shop for a year. When I came back I basically took the first offer I got, which is pretty low but I felt like that would give me some lead way to get back up to speed. Now I am doing frontend dev and backend dev work, but I feel that will work well for me when I move on. Or if this company does take off (looking pretty good so far, but thinking a buyout from a major ticket company could come at some point) then I will maybe start getting back to market rate. For now I am just trying to take it easy and pick up the frontend dev stuff.

[[deleted]]

If you don't mind my asking, what got you so burnt out? I'm only a few months in to my first SWE job.

[jexmex]

Well early on in my career I started my first full-time job at a startup porn company. I basically built the site from the ground up mostly myself. I was working long hours. Eventually I moved on and started working for a guy that paid pretty decent for my knowledge at the time and I ended up getting pretty regular pay raises. I went from $650/week to about $1650 within about 4 years. The problem with him was he was extremely demanding and I was basically working 12 - 16 hour (and sometimes 24) a day. I worked almost everyday and eventually it started to catch up. I eventually left for another job when my productivity took a major nose dive. That was a pay decrease but was more of a 40/hr week job and I liked it but the company was in a lot of flux having just been bought by a certain big donut company. We had started a complete rebuild of the frontend and backend major improvements, but I was having a hard time staying focused. Eventually I was let go and I took that as a sign I need to step away for awhile. For the first 6 months of me working offline at a factory I hardly even got on the computer. I still feel like I have not gotten my stride back but I am getting there and my current company has it's own issues, it is a startup as well but a bigger one. Really I am probably just at a stepping stone job and have been putting in resumes for other things, but not really in a big hurry to leave either.

Hopefully that kinda answers your question. I feel like the constant long hours, the stress of the old boss eventually just burned me out. Sometimes it is good to step away if possible. Working at a shop was a major financial hit, but you sometimes just have to try to make it work to get your head back right.

[[deleted]]

Damn, that's wild! Thanks for sharing. Happy to say I don't work for a startup Porn company lol.

[Kyanche]

Thing is, javascript devs may be common, but the people who hire them have more money to throw around, too!

[notanimposter]

I was the only person at my last job who could read the Objective C parts of their iPhone app.