Re:The mainframe is alive and thriving
by throwawayboise on Thursday March 11, 2021 @06:00PM
(#26430118)
> Cobol programming is a skill that is trivially taught.
And this used to be very common. My first job out of school in the early 1990s was with a "big consulting firm" they had a boot camp where they taught COBOL to batches of new hires. You did that for a month, and then were deployed to a client site writing COBOL about 50 hours a week.
AA?
I wonder if it's less that COBOL is hard and more that there's a lot of design philosophies in legacy codebases that more recently trained developers are going to find frustrating/error prone.
I've done some work in the financial space. It's interesting to compare, for example, expressing a credit card transaction in an ISO 8583 message versus a modern JSON/REST API format. The same data might be there, but one of them is going to be much harder to debug without a lot of specialized tooling.
Cobol programming is a skill that is trivially taught. Any student with a Cmpt. Science degree from a credible institution, given a curriculum, can learn any programming language in a month with a bit of focus/appropriate curriculum. Can pick up the necessary frameworks in a reasonable period of time. Then it's just a matter of teaching them the line of business, and the practices and procedures.
I would claim that, given twelve months, you could teach a cohort of recent Cmpt. Science graduates all the skills they needed to be successful in any Insurance/Banking/Finance programing environment.
And these are developers that you can then pay a very reasonable salary - say, $150K/year - which is $75/hour, not $300/hr, at the cost of 1 year of salary as they come on board, come up to speed (say at an out-of-college salary of $100K/year.) - You need 1,000 of those developers - that's an up-front cost of $100mm, at which point you have your developers.
Compared to a multi-billion dollar transition cost off of a mainframe, I know which one I would chose if I were the PHB.