[earino]

I have been deeply fascinated by COBOL ever since 1994. In 1994 I was looking at where to go to college, and the community college near the town I grew up had two "computer" associates programs. One was a program focused on personal computers, and one was a program focused on mainframes. The person I spoke to at the school told me, at the time, that as far as he could tell graduates of both programs got good jobs, but he never saw anyone cross from one to the other. Once the track was picked, the lives and careers diverged. He described the mainframe path as "for going deep into the guts of banks, insurance companies, government and big big companies." It was not a great pitch to give a 16 year old IMO.

I ended up going to neither and went to a traditional CS undergrad at a 4 year state school, and things have been fine ever since. However, on a regular basis, I think about the other life I would have had, if instead I had gotten an associate's in mainframe programming. What would I have done? Where would I have worked? Who even are those folks.

If today I found a COBOL bootcamp that reskilled developers for a career change into COBOL, i may even seriously consider it. An unexplored path that has always been in the back of my head, deep in the guts of the engines of industry.

[wvenable]

I did a co-op semester at a large company doing work on mainframes with COBOL in the late 90s. They had brought some of us in along with some other new hires. The other hires were slightly older and come from other careers. For example, one guy wanted to get out construction and into technology and that's why he was there. The company did extensive in house training because none of this stuff is taught anywhere.

It's like an alien world where some of the ideas are similar but also everything is completely different. Linux/Mac/Windows are all different but they are not different like working with mainframes is different. So if you started without any PC background, it really doesn't matter.

Personally, it wasn't for me. The whole thing was basically frustrating. The technology was frustrating. The glacial pace of development was frustrating. One program I worked on was literally older than I was. The code quality was very high (given the technology) but that was accomplished by sheer effort rather than having smart tools.

[ecshafer]

I worked at one of the big financial corps where we were built on top of IBM DB2 with plenty of Cobol and JCL. Almost every team had 1-3 Cobol or "Data" programmers as we said embedded in them. If you needed to get or store data, it involved writing Cobol store procedures, and calling them from Java. There was also a lot of mainframe code running batch jobs that did a lot of critical work. this was from 2016-2021 so its pretty recent.

Cobol devs were on average a bit older (on average id say 10-15 older than the rest of the devs), mainly because there weren't many college grads going in, and like your advisor had said there was a split between cobol and non-cobol devs with very little overlap.

The majority of the cobol devs seemed to fall into a few camps. There were people who graduated in the 80s or 90s and just kept doing the same thing. There was also a large amount of Eastern Europeans that had immigrated in the 90s / 2000s and were cobol devs. Then there were also a decent amount of Indian contracting companies (TCS and the like) which seem to also train people in Cobol even today to hire as contractors.

[lancebeet]

At least where I live, most/all established banks have COBOL training programs for new hires. A friend of mine started one just a couple of months ago. As I understand it, it's not easy for them to find people who are both skilled programmers and willing to learn COBOL. If you really want to reskill into a COBOL developer, I believe that's very much an option still.

[earino]

Thanks for the pointer! Do you (or your friend) happen to have a link to a sample job post that I may be able to use to identify these opportunities in the future?

[nix23]

Not job related but have a look at Xplore and get your hands on a Mainframe and Cobol:

https://www.ibm.com/it-infrastructure/z/education/zxplore

[lancebeet]

Unfortunately I don't have any link to such a job post, but when I've seen them in the past they've clearly stated what they are about, so keywords like "COBOL" or "Mainframe" would certainly find them. Sorry I couldn't be any more help.

[earino]

No worries at all, again thanks for the pointers!

[MonkeyClub]

There’s a Coursera course series for that, coincidentally found it today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34012657

[earino]

Amazing! Thank you so much for pointing this out to me. It's basically exactly what I hoped to find :-)

[e12e]

You can run COBOL at the edge, with cloudflare:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-now-support-c...