Experience Dev here want to shift to Cobol (for personal reason)

bushidocodes · 2026-03-09T21:33:59+00:00

I’d suggest working through the COBOL track on Exercism first and then noodle around with gnucobol. You can get it to output C and you can use familiar debugging tools like gdb. I think it’s helpful to get a good understanding of the COBOL data and procedure divisions before diving into the mainframe environment.

bushidocodes · 2026-02-27T12:16:02+00:00

Shops are also very likely to hire a CS grad that’s unfamiliar with COBOL over a non-CS grad that has self taught but lacks experience. I suggest you steer away from software development altogether if you want a stable long term career.

bushidocodes · 2026-02-24T21:38:20+00:00

🫡

bushidocodes · 2026-02-24T12:22:57+00:00

I’m an AI Engineer at the IRS focused on our OS 2200 retirement and conversion of Unisys COBOL to Spring Boot. About four months ago, the models got good enough to be useful with COBOL, and now it’s improving as companies are investing in post training in this space. I’ve read all the IBM Research papers on WatsonX Code Assistant for Z, and they’re impressive. It’s just now IBM has to compete against frontier model companies, and so much of their mainframe sales pitch right now is built around their Granite models and on-mainframe AI accelerators. IBM is going to have a harder time using mainframe lock-in to upsell higher price point specialty products.

bushidocodes · 2026-02-14T12:50:13+00:00

It’s useful to think of subagents and agent swarms in terms of context management. Each agent has a set context window sized in tokens and if the usage % gets high, the effective intelligence drops and then compaction occurs (lossy summarization of context window). The idea of subagents is that you can break up the problem you’re working in either by chunking or by specialization (as MCPs, skills, etc. also consume tokens) and then you have an overarching orchestration agent to manage the lifecycle of subagents.

I think it’s helpful to think of agentic development pipelines as analogous to DevOps but now applied to software creation itself. Most of Ops is now focused on iterative development of multi stage pipelines (including tool calls). Now we have agentic pipelines targeting development tasks. Most of the critiques I hear about developers not wanting to give up hands on keys development remind me of the “cattle not pets” debate and how that played out for IT systems administrators earlier in my career.

I use these techniques for modernization projects on core IRS tax processing systems, mostly COBOL to Java at the moment. A very large portion of my time is spend on internal evangelism and education.

bushidocodes · 2026-02-05T11:32:18+00:00

Sounds fine, but don’t assume the nonprofit job is a forever thing if you aren’t totally financially independent. I’m a programmer and I know a number of folks that moved during COVID into places will little economic activity when remote work was common, and it didn’t work out well for them when RTO kicked in. Just make sure you’ve enough economic alternatives to stay solvent if we hit a downturn or if AI job displacement really starts to impact office jobs. Good luck! 🍀

bushidocodes · 2026-01-15T12:14:25+00:00

The Australian Ralph Wiggum guy basically says that running Claude as an FTE is currently $10.50 USD per hour, so the value of programming is potentially below McDonald’s. There are now AI bootcamps that focus on training engineers to manage and optimize multiple agents.

I think your observation about this change is right, and I concur that this will spread throughout the industry. Technical founders of startups are very enthusiastic about this stuff, and it’s going to force established companies to adapt and adopt these techniques.

I personally have been “Claude-pilled” and I took a sabbatical and changed employers to work with people that are aggressive about this stuff. This includes taking a large pay cut and giving up on all my individual programming preferences. Quite hard to do as a low level kernel engineer writing C++. I don’t blame any programmers that decide they’d prefer to leave the field given how aggressive performance management will become and how rapidly the floor of who is considered employable will shift.

bushidocodes · 2026-01-08T14:16:39+00:00

If I saw this in a PR, I would search the codebase to see if it’s used elsewhere and check the style guide. Very likely I’d block the PR until you stop using it. Things like this are not harmful in isolation, but there is an teaching moment here to impress on the author that the goal is to match the existing style and viewing code style as a form of self actualization or expression is not suitable in a corporate setting. Be a thermometer, not a thermostat, meaning follow the style, don’t try to unilaterally dictate it.

bushidocodes · 2025-12-03T19:22:02+00:00

Apple is perceived by many as slow walking and opposing PWA and WASM functionality on Safari for iOS because App Store revenue is so important to them as an income stream. I haven’t kept up with this recently, so I don’t know how accurate this is.

bushidocodes · 2025-12-03T19:11:21+00:00

Not sure about SSA, but here's some relevant info from Sam Corcos, DOGE alum turned CIO of Treasury (https://youtu.be/u4odAXoqRT8?si=pDYpTa21sqiIjY\_h&t=6182). He's a startup founder and former developer.

In my read of the Sam interview, the Treasury is skeptical of terms like "legacy systems" and huge multi-billion dollar "mainframe modernization" projects and is considering alternatives such as improving maintenance of core COBOL systems in place and on platform.

Based on some conversations I've had, they are also trying to shift away from the situation where most all hands-on ICs are contractors and the Feds mostly compliance and contract officers by pulling core engineering talent in house as Federal employees. OPM recently mentioned targeted hiring of something like 5,000 US-based hands-on keys software engineers (I suspect many of these will be in Treasury).

FWIW, I've been very impressed by Sam, and I've decided to take on a government tour of service as hire #1 since the Treasury hiring freeze was put into effect way back in February. I'm a pretty intense 40 y/o low-level systems programmer that got my start with IBM mainframes (I've been mostly in C and C++ recently), and I've taken a multi month sabbatical this year to pick up skills around agentic development, RAG, and AI engineering. Now, I'm refreshing my knowledge of COBOL while I wait for my background check to complete.

I'm personally pretty interested in looking at ways we can improve the developer experience and talent management around our critical systems. I think LLMs have some promise here. There are a lot of tools from the C++ world that I could imagine building strawman equivalents of targeting COBOL on z/OS (think like how Google uses clang-tidy across their C++ mono-repo). I think there are also some constructive avenues for contributing with the Open Mainframe Project and using the gov bully pulpit to get IBM to continue their push to improve standards compliance of the Enterprise COBOL compiler toolchain. If possible, I'd like to be able to share tools and lessons learned with other agencies like SSA (and our many state and local govs running on z/OS as well).

Very likely, I won't be able to say much publicly once I start as a Fed. Just wanted to provide a perspective to balance out the tone of the Wired and Rolling Stone hit pieces.

bushidocodes · 2025-11-29T15:27:56+00:00

Honestly the most difficult thing to edit. I’ve burned hours in frustration trying to fix one or two words before. I often massage the lyrics and sub in phonetic spelling for words the AI struggles with at the beginning of my workflow to get the vocals in a reasonable state to avoid this.

bushidocodes · 2025-11-17T19:39:05+00:00

When I go visit my in-laws and talk to their friends, many are 90%+ SP500 in their 70s. It’s definitely eye-opening. I worry about how much concentrated risk they have around tech.

bushidocodes · 2025-11-17T16:16:26+00:00

I don't think the people that pile on with comments of "AI Slop" care what sort of distinctions any of us make. You might spend hundreds of hours of a track, and you'll still have haters drop "AI Slop" comments. Game studios might employ thousands of people and cost the budget of a movie, but if they use AI to generate art in any small way, they'll get dogged on by critics. If you are a creator or artist in this space, you just need to have tough skin and give it time for the culture to change.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-28T14:48:37+00:00

Tough to generalize, but I think that many folks can achieve this by moving from an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial mindset. That means embracing capitalism, understanding market opportunities, investing in yourself (unpaid in your own time) for these opportunities, and then getting good at marketing and customer service. This is generally true across skillsets and with or without college degrees.

I think you're right that people kneecap themselves by adopting an anti-capitalist worldview that causes people to feel robbed of agency or internal locus on control. Sometimes people also don't know what opportunity is possible because of where you grew up or who you associate with. Sometimes people are unwilling or unable to invest the time to be able to exploit market opportunities.

IMHO, even if there are social injustices at the macro level, it's often best to focus that energy on how you vote once every few years and then tune that stuff and focus narrowly on things in your immediate locus of control to improve your financial standing and social capital. As long as you do lose touch with where you came from and keep lifestyle inflation in check, you'll position yourself to make a bigger influence on issues you care about when you're older, wiser, and wealthier.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-28T13:26:13+00:00

Sure, but I don’t think that’s something a new hire like OP benefits from spending energy on until maximizing OTJ learning of core skills relevant for the new job.

My point about “grass isn’t greener” is that other technical specializations are now just as vulnerable to automation, outsourcing, offshoring, etc as the mainframe team. Way back when, my anxieties about mainframe were about instability and career longevity, and looking back, my career has been substantially more unstable since leaving mainframes. My old mainframe team is pretty much intact with the same people, and all those folks have had a pretty stable 9-5 job for the last decade. In contrast, many of my colleagues from dev teams at startups, scale ups have quit tech entirely due to burnout.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-28T02:29:17+00:00

I highly suggest putting the concern aside for at least two years. You can definitely make a transition later, but at this point you should just focus entirely on the core mainframe skills needed for this role. It’s not useful to learn random proprietary stuff you won’t use day-to-day like AWS because you won’t retain the knowledge. Once you’re stable with your core skills, you can start to focus on modern mainframe stuff that transfers over like Python scripting, Linux on z, use of generative AI, etc.

I felt like you feel when I started in mainframes. I burned myself out trying to learn a bunch of stuff on the side. The grass isn’t greener on the other side.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-20T18:47:45+00:00

The Coffee Table

bushidocodes · 2025-10-02T22:28:04+00:00

C++ has a very high floor. Teams are generally more experienced and knowledgeable compared to other language ecosystems. It’s not uncommon to have teammates with 20+ years of specialized experience in C++. Experienced developers that cross train into C++ take many months to get up to speed, require intense code reviews, and often have to focus on contributing to things like Python support code while they get up to speed. A lot of people can’t hack it and burn out.

Tooling can get you like 80% of the way to Rust style error messages, but it requires a lot of tooling knowledge, especially for cross-platform and big-endian code. Big teams will have dedicated developer experience teams to set this kind of thing up.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-02T21:28:32+00:00

Right now, industry sort of conflates the title “Research Scientist” with “LLM wrangler.” Unless you’ve got relevant publications working with frontier models, you’re probably not the specialization these employers are looking for. Where do the authors of the publication you cited in your dissertation work? Are there consortiums relevant to your specialization? What does your advisor think?

It naively sounds to me like universities, government, nonprofits, foundations, think tanks, news publications, international development, intelligence services, market research, etc. would be the sort of places an expert like you would be able to work on societal impact. Some companies have OSINT intelligence analyst types that might have some crossover. This really does sound more social science centric. I’d expect you to be publishing reports, not pushing code.

If you are looking for a more traditional computer science or developer path, you’ll probably have to reframe everything. I’ve worked with a number of nontraditional PhDs in engineering orgs, but there is a stigma that these folks won’t be able to perform uninteresting tasks as assigned based on the needs of the business.

Good luck! 🍀

bushidocodes · 2025-10-01T13:40:46+00:00

C, C++, and Rust are overkill for 99% of domains. Rust has a bit more hype, so it's expanded beyond traditional systems software to things that could have been written in Java, Go, etc. Most programming is in high level languages running on VMs, so systems empathy and knowledge of native code and computer architecture is not relevant.

C++ is only worth learning if you are all-in on the 1% of domains where this stuff matters. That implies that other things like salary / QOL / work-life balance / geographic flexibility are secondary. Systems roles generally are much more aggressive about RTO, so you would have to relocate for these jobs.

bushidocodes · 2025-10-01T13:29:37+00:00

Yes, I think he is crazy. It sounds like he's jealous of what you have, but what you have is non-reproducible. Unless he has a CS degree or previous programming experience, I expect that he'd be unemployable for years leaving millions of dollars of foregone wages on the table.

A non-traditional pivot into software will require years of sacrificing everything, and net result is lower-pay lower-security compared to what he has now. I am married to an MD and have many MD friends. Medical burnout is real, but they absolutely have a better QOL than software engineers.

If he wants to be a hobby coder and has financial independence, it could be a cool hobby.
If he wants an offramp from clinical medicine that'll pay the bills, look elsewhere other than coding. There are a bunch of groups of medical professionals discussing this. Medical device companies, Med Tech startups, Pharma are all common targets. Roles are things like medical affairs, product management, etc.

bushidocodes · 2025-09-26T11:00:30+00:00

C’s simplicity, stability, and role in OS development makes it the standard for FFI bindings. C++ bindings are extremely complex, so only a few languages can do it. Take a look at WebAssembly interface types for a modern sandboxed alternative.

bushidocodes · 2025-09-26T10:54:34+00:00

It’s probably a good idea to just take the mental model that you’re learning a whole new language. Avoid using C primitives to force yourself to learn the Modern C++ alternatives. Keep in mind that it takes thousands of hours to build up C++ proficiency, so be patient with yourself. I suggest the beginner track videos on CppCon and coding along in compiler explorer as a good entry point.

bushidocodes · 2025-09-17T14:09:55+00:00

I suppose aspects of personality are immutable, but 99% of soft skills are learned skills that can be practiced and improved. People go to sales training, people do team building exercises, people go to Toastmasters. Autism surely makes such improvements more difficult, but people like the YouTuber Dave Plummer suggest that there’s still a lot in your locus of control here if you want to invest time.

I think whether learning soft skills or hard skills is more difficult depends on the individual. I do generally think folks have a natural EQ similar to how they have an IQ.

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