Forbes - How to fill the mainframe legacy skills gap (COBOL)

[Mik]

Interesting piece that has some figures on just how much COBOL is still out there. It's a lot and it still runs a lot of the world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/04/29/how-to-solve-the-legacy-mainframe-skills-gap/#5a2fbf9c10ed

[Copper]

@forbes said >

In fact, more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code remain in production, with that number growing each year.

Sure, why not? COBOL is OK. It does the job.

[Mik]

All computer languages are tools. Nothing more. if the tool does the job you need done all is well.

[jon-nyc]

These seems like one of these small problems that labor markets can easily solve.

[Mik]

Yep. What I have found is there are about a zillion COBOL programmers out there ready to work.

[jon-nyc]

In 1999 I was at a company which I won’t name but runs a big electronic stock market.

They were trying to upgrade their big market system in time for Y2K but the project failed.

When they realized it wasn’t going to make it they had to urgently upgrade their ancient legacy (early 70s) system which was written in MASM - which is assembler for Unisys mainframe.

They dragged a couple guys out of deep retirement by throwing so much money at them they couldn’t say no. One of the guys had lung cancer but still did it.

[jon-nyc]

Actually it wasn’t Y2K now that I think about it but decimalization. Right around the same time.

Remember when stocks quoted in fractions?