Re:Why are there so few black people in STEM?
by blackrock on Monday June 15, 2020 @07:23AM
(#23526179)
Nice story. COBOL programmers started making some serious money with Y2K. At least, the contractors started billing advanced hourly rates. And were making more than they ever did.
And from what I’ve been seeing, COBOL just isn’t going anywhere. Those mainframes really are built to last. So he should probably have a job for the rest of his life. I hope he’s got a nice pension.
Re:Why are there so few black people in STEM?
by scarface74 on Monday June 15, 2020 @09:11AM
(#23526922)
I hope so. I posted on Facebook that I found my old FORTRAN, Pascal and COBOL textbooks from college when I went home to visit my parents and tagged him and few other classmates.
We graduated in the mid 90s. The book was last updated in 1985. He told me he was still programming in COBOL. I just got quiet. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to insult him.
But, we also have to look at statistics and think longitudinally instead of anecdotally.
I came from a middle class family in a small town in the south. But my mom being a well connected high school math teacher did give me some advantages.
When I graduated from college, I had a choice between taking a job in a slightly larger city where I could have afforded to take care of myself or move to Atlanta where I could get a job as a computer operator based on a previous internship. But the pay was crap.
I wanted to move to Atlanta because I knew I would have more opportunities. My parents had already bought me car, they subsidized me for the first year, and the rest is history - I was able to network my way into getting a software development position. This was in the late 90s.
My classmate couldn’t afford to make those choices. He was stuck taking a COBOL programming job in the 90s - the same job I turned down and still is doing that to this day in the same city.