COBOL: For a Promising Career with ULTIMATE Job Security!

[Sanjiv]

COBOL: The Dinosaur Language that CANNOT be Simply Replaced!

Every day, 3 Trillion-dollar worth of transactions are handled by this 65-year old language (banking, insurance, government...). This video is worth watching twice.

If it ain't broken, don't fix it. As a COBOL programmer, I approve this message!

Upgrading systems to use shiny modern languages is highly EXPENSIVE and RISKY!

Imagine what you could buy with $800,000 in 1959... Approx 115 houses in the burbs at 7k each. Anything you wanted A Lamborghini Countach was approx $200,000 in the 80s at that time a house was like $30,000 in 1960 they would have been $5,000 - $10,000 You could have most whatever you wanted and then ... retired comfortably for life

I have never understood why anybody thinks COBOL is difficult. The code tells you what it is doing in ENGLISH

You will definitely not run out of opportunities to work. And you can make a fortune doing so!

I will move COBOL from "obsolete skills" section to "strategic skills" on my resume!

Most companies I work with are still developing COBOL today. Many of the mainframe systems have developed to support newer technologies, like Web Services, using regular COBOL. The code is compiled so well it is hard to compete with it on the mainframe where every MIP counts. Also these companies have the same code that was written decades ago and it still runs today without a recompile. Third party libraries for COBOL are nearly inexistent. Those trying to change to Java and use third party libraries usually have to recompile once in awhile to allow a newer version of the framework with bug and security fixes. To me that is the wrong direction and the throughput is hard to beat on the mainframe

Correct, my company has lots of COBOL programmers still and it's far from "old" code. We're running on the newest zOS, current mainframes, most recent version of DB2, etc. We have web interfaces, APIs and everything you'd expect from a current application. While most of our new applications are Java now we're still writing some new COBOL applications for the stuff that absolutely can not ever go down

I'm 54 and have been a Java dev ever since Java came around. I also to have some OS390 experience from my early days (PL/1, JCL). I do wonder sometimes if I should learn COBOL so I can spend the rest of my career maintaining old, boring (but important) COBOL programs... possibly getting a better pay than now, and having a less stressful job than now - and not having to chase every new tech trend every few months anymore - which does get harder when you get older

My aunt retired from her programming job in the 1980s. In 1998 she took a consulting gig for a small company to "get ready for Y2K", updating their 30 year old mainframe software. Word got out, and the small companies all started hiring her. Work a week, go on to the next one. As the deadline got tighter, the offers got richer, but time was the issue. She'd tell a potential customer "I think I need 3 days, but it'll take me 1.5 days to travel both ways and I only have a 4 day window in my schedule - unless you wait till after the new year". "I'll fly my private jet to the city you are in now, wait for you to finish, take you direct from their door to mine, and take you to your next job after, that'll save you 20 hours of airlines and airports". That became the new standard. She'd call the next company on the list when she was wrapping up, and they'd have transport at the door when she walked out. Limos, charters, private planes from Lears to Piper Cubs, even helicopters normally used for logging. She finished her last job on January 1st 2000 and retired again.

I have a friend of mine that is still a highly proficient (but semi retired) programmer in COBOL and like me now in her 60's. She still comes out to play when her former customers need COBOL changes and makes a lot of money. When the Y2K panic came along in 2000 she was in big demand. Most old COBOL based software systems were never designed to go through a millennium change (00)She made a fortune upgrading COBOL based systems for many big companies, banks etc, and rich very quickly. She was quite busy for a year or two!! It is not really any harder to learn than any other language

I was a Cobol programmer once - not by choice though but a colleague resigned and made the big mistake of mentioning that I knew it on my CV and my boss remembered that. It is not the language really but IBM mainframes that makes it live so long - IBM developed several families of mainframes starting with the S/360 family and they all are compatible with each other. From custom CPUs to PowerPC's of the Z series today can in emulation mode and boot the OS and programs written in the 1960's. The US tax system is written in a combination of IBM mainframe assembler and for Cobol running on a mainframe from 1960. Today they still doing your tax returns using it on a modern IBM mainframe but the same code.

 

The problem here is the US Tax Code is always changing -- Congress just can't help itself. So changes constantly need to be made. I don't think COBOL has been taught at any major university since probably 1995 at the latest -- so there aren't many COBOL programmers out there. And some, like me, have far more interesting jobs now -- so it would take a veritable fortune to lure us back.

Two quotes: 1) "I know COBOL and I won't starve" C. Pitts Control Data Corp. circa 1979. 2). "What runs on the mainframe? Civilization." Roberts, International Business Machines circa 1987. Both statements are as applicable today as the were 40 to 50 years, from Shanghai to lower Manhattan and all points in between. Anyone who can code can pickup COBOL in about 1 hour (I did it on the Chicago NW line one afternoon). The institutions you listed didn't even name the largest institutions depending on COBOL. Why COBOL? It still works and doesn't even need recompilation. Book of records usually requires continuous availability and those grand mums and nainai from Chengdu to Mumbai, Joburg, San Palo and Des Moines expect those ATM and credit cards to work 99.999% of the time even after a disaster and that means COBOL running on big iron, even in Wai Guo Qiao Pudong.

IBM mainframes are the silent workhorses in the economy. They sit there and run year after year. The z in z/OS truly means zero down time. All that COBOL code regardless of what any new gen says is truly an investment—much of it made decades ago. I work in IBM midrange (35 years now). Our systems run a billion dollar enterprise. The only worry we have is the lack of talent

COBOL was “old” when I was in college. The biggest issue with cobol systems is how a set of programs will share files. So knowing the language is only the first step. Understanding the dependencies and interactions is the bulk of the problem

stuff like this is why the Y2K conversation will happen again in the late 2030's, I believe 2037. Too many people do not understand that the reason Y2K was a non-issue was because of the skill of the techs at the time. However, the fix for these old languages was to rotate the 2 digit year column out 40 some years, and thus from the date of that programming fix, add 40+ years, and the new Y2K date is 2037. It is time to move off of ALL of the old code base. Rotating the date ranges every 40 years is a non-solution

Cobol is still used for a reason, there is nothing to match it in efficiency and speed in many important fields.  And Cobol do support graphical user interfaces... Simply build a Cobol backend application with an API layer, and call it from a front-end, receive a response and present the data in any way you desire :). When you login to one of the larger banks and perform a transaction for example, several real-time Cobol modules will be running/executed on a mainframe somewhere, and data then sent and presented to you via browser/app...  I work as a Cobol/Mainframe developer...

Yes the big banks have smart people, and they know the cost of conversion is too expensive. Today's compilers can optimize the object code to run as fast as any of the new languages on any of the current "big" computers. So why spend the money to make unnecessary changes? We are usually talking about long running big data processes.(not those that run on "the mill" small department processors). In a past experience, a sales department of a multi-million dollar company, thought it could cut their budget costs by moving their systems off the main frame to a "department" processor. On the mainframe, the weekly sales report was run in 3 hours. They took their source Cobol code compiled it on the department machine. The first time they ran the weekly report, it took 8 days to run.. Not good for a weekly report. The problem was not the source code, but more likely the compiler, the OS environment, and the hardware capacity. With the right combination, everything runs fast. As long as the hardware vendors can provide optimizing compilers, Cobol or any other legacy language will not die! I remember Auto-code. Without a compiler, it died with its hardware machine

Any programming language that is compiled into machine code is going to perform better imho. all of the "modern/scripting" languages are just interpreted by the back-end programs. it's just an extra bottleneck in the call-stack. Modern tech stacks are optimized for developer productivity and as such are quite bloated at runtime. I would be really surprised if any interpreted language beats COBOL in an apples-to-apples comparison (which means decimal math BTW). COBOL is a compiled language, so the efficiency is not in the language but in the compiler, and these are updated with every new generation of computers

One of the biggest benefits of using COBOL is that it does EXACT decimal arithmetic (i.e., not floating point double precision) , which is a huge advantage in financial systems. You can write highly structured code that is really easy to read - almost self documenting. But it's not at all suitable for web development, which is a huge disbenefit for most developers

Microsoft Visual Basic 6 had a Currency data type. It was simply a 64 bit integer that was scaled to 4 decimal places, so it would operate to $0.0001 accuracy

nobody should EVER be using floats for anything involving money. This is well established, and databases and other programming languages have supported various means of doing exact decimal arithmetic for decades. Java, for example has supported the BigDecimal class since 2006, and there were likely some form of add-on before it existed

Normally any discussion of COBOL mentions Grace Hopper, one of the inventors of the language. There is anecdotal evidence she was also involved with the use of the term "bug" and "debugging". I learned COBOL in 1980 and used it for most of my career

Cobol has several unique and undesirable traits. First, it was meant to be self-documenting leading to geometrically increasing confusion with each maintenance action. Second, if you needed a program written that would take a skilled programmer one week, by assigning two programmers, the project will now take a minimum of two weeks. Third, Cobol programs written years ago, having been debugged several times, still have the ability to fail in a totally unique way, and they regularly did. The purpose of higher level programming languages was to transportability between machine architectures. Each computer manufacturer defined its machine language, they then had to write a compiler that would convert the Cobol source code into functional machine language. It would thus seem possible that one could write a compiler that could convert Cobol source code into Python source code

In the 90s I worked for a major insurance company that was still using COBOL on mainframes for their backend stuff, actuarial tables, transactions, logging, etc. In the almost decade that I worked there they had 3 times where it was announced they were replacing it. Each time they tried to start that process, they gave up and just made a fancy new GUI that interfaced with the old systems. Now, 25+ years after I started I still have contacts there and it's all still chugging away on COBOL

Proud COBOL'er and still here. The oldest code I wrote that is still running in production was delivered in 1983 with a Y2K update in 1999

I became a COBOL programmer in 1975 thanks to IBM’s self-teaching manuals. Then I spent the next 20 years making a living at it. Difficult? No. Verbose? Yep. But its verbosity is one of its advantages. Well written structured COBOL should be self-documenting

I am 30 years old and COBOL was the first Programming language I learnt in my company. I was a COBOL Programmer for nearly 10 years. Leaving that company and learning real programming languages was like a caveman entering a city in the 20th century

COBOL is a compiled transactional record oriented compiled language. Python is a general purpose interpretive language. Huge difference when it comes to accounting. It's alive because it thrives in business

Anyone in the banking or insurance business knows COBOL is not dead at all. So "no one knows anymore" is somewhat of a bold statement, as there are so many people, ages 20 up to 80 years old, who are actually still working in COBOL

AutoCad is (still) global leader of CAD software, but Autodesk refuse to completely rewrite it so users can use the modern CPU's. Instead it still contains its legecy code (over 30 years old), limiting it to single thread operation

Long live COBOL and COBOL programmers. Make these greedy corporations pay for your skills. Don’t sell yourself short

1. COBOL programmers are available to employers who are willing to pay for them. 2. People can still learn COBOL. 3. The reasons ANY old code base survives are a) it works, why change it? and b) when you have millions of lines of legacy code, not only is it sometimes difficult to know what it does, but also WHICH of those lines of code actually ever execute. Dead code can be as much as 2/3 of a codebase. Additionally, not only does old code sometimes lack documentation, but also tests, so risk exists that if you change something HERE, you may break something THERE, without knowing it.

The World Depends on 65-Year-Old Code No One Knows Anymore

 

[Sanjiv]

here are a few more facts on COBOL...

COBOL programmers are still accountable for processing more than 70% of business transactions worldwide – as per IBM. That's the beauty of this g(old) programming language – AS400 COBOL has endured and continues to thrive because of its remarkable security, reliability, and transactional performance.

COBOL is a language that was very popular and future proof in the 1970's and 1980, but that has become a liability due to lack of developers. The demise of COBOL has therefor been predicted for decades (since the mid 1990's), but somehow the language is still in use.

COBOL is the lifeblood of Enterprise IT and the powerhouse behind 95% of ATM transactions, along with millions of business processes each day, from healthcare to airlines to government systems. It's safe to say that COBOL isn't going away any time soon.

Why Young Developers Should Consider Learning Old Languages. Updated for 2023. COBOL, while considered a legacy program, is still in high demand

Governments and companies with large amounts of data and numerous transactions rely on COBOL today. It does business processing very well. Processes like inventory, payroll, insurance, banking, and any processing of dollars and cents are exactly what COBOL is built to do.

Unlike modern programming languages that require specific syntax, COBOL is relatively simple to learn. It was developed “to be easy to read, understand, and program for programmers in the 1960s who had few explicit training opportunities”

In general, learning COBOL can take you 2 to 3 weeks, depending on your previous experience with other programming languages. Great, isn't it? And if you're looking to master its entire Mainframe environment, it can take you about two months - again, depending on your experience as a programmer.

How many COBOL programmers are there in the US?

• An estimated 2 million people in the world are currently working in COBOL; rough estimates put the US figure at around 20,000 people
• COBOL supports 90 percent of Fortune 500 business systems every day
• 70 percent of all critical business logic and data is written in COBOL

COBOL's ability to process large masses of data and perform business-critical tasks efficiently has enabled applications developed in that language to make it to the present day.

How much does senior COBOL make?

 

Senior Cobol Programmer Salary

	Annual Salary	Hourly Wage
Top Earners	$143,000	$69
75th Percentile	$130,000	$62
Average	$108,736	$52
25th Percentile	$91,500	$44

 

if you learn COBOL you will definitely have a lot of job opportunities. Everyone learns the new languages now, but there is a lot of demand for developers able to work on legacy systems. its so bad that some companies are begging retired programmers to come out of retirement to fix a problem for them. So if you learn COBOL or any other legacy language, expect to work on number of old systems, doing very specific things that there is just no modern replacement to.

COBOL: Why Young Developers Should Consider Learning Old Languages

[Vijay]

That's a very interesting video!

If AI is going to eat away our jobs eventually, maybe COBOL is the way to go back to the basics as COBOL will definitely "outlive" our careers (it's like the evergreen PL/SQL, learn-once and use forever). I know a guy who learnt MicroFocus COBOL on MS-DOS in the 90's.

[Sanjiv]

11 hours ago, Vijay said:

That's a very interesting video!

If AI is going to eat away our jobs eventually, maybe COBOL is the way to go back to the basics as COBOL will definitely "outlive" our careers (it's like the evergreen PL/SQL, learn-once and use forever). I know a guy who learnt MicroFocus COBOL on MS-DOS in the 90's.

[Sanjiv]

COBOL: Why Young Developers Should Consider Learning Old Languages

Visual COBOL Personal Edition (FREE)

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/products/cobol/visual-cobol-personal-edition

Learn COBOL in 1 Day

https://www.rocketsoftware.com/learn-cobol

IBM is such a fortunate company to be having the evergreen cash cow language COBOL and Mainframes that are NEVER going to die

IBM: What is COBOL?

https://www.ibm.com/topics/cobol

IBM: Free course: Announcing Learning COBOL Programming with VSCode

https://www.ibm.com/blogs/ibm-training/free-course-announcing-learning-cobol-programming-with-vscode/

IBM: Learning COBOL Programming with VSCode - learn in 16 hours and get a Badge!

https://learn.ibm.com/course/view.php?id=7552

UDEMY: The Complete Mainframe Professional Course - 4 Courses in 1 (COBOL, JCL, VSAM, CICS)

https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-mainframe-professional-course-tso-ispf

Most IMPORTANT Programming Language to Learn in 2024 for Job Security is COBOL!

Wow! He did the entire video nonstop while driving without a script or bullet list !!
800 Billion lines of COBOL code exists in production!

COBOL in 100 seconds

"The reason you don't go beyond 72 characters is because it has to fit on a punch card and ensures your program is responsive on mobile devices" LOL

This programming language isn't just for businesses, it is a business. It has DIVISIONS and everything! 🤣

Cobol is so toxic language if you program in cobol you will always SHOUT AT PEOPLE in "UPPERCASE" 😂

COBOL: I'm going to have verbose syntax. Also COBOL: I'm going to only let you have only 72 characters per line!

Damn, I can't believe it's already 2059!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFJXUFWzOZc&list=PLfg9ycqfY2SXh1fUFzoRwxLdMMbUFzg8E