I think some COBOL consultants are very well paid, especially since they are a rare breed.
The OGs are. The new trainees ain’t.
Which makes sense, but they are still being seriously taken advantage of.Friend has a cobol + IBM AIX combo going for him and his on call + at most 1 day/week of work position pays more than my full time very senior dev role.
Hmm I have the AIX half of that. Maybe learning COBOL is worth the pain…
I know a person who does AIX consulting with Cobol. She works about 4-8 weeks a year spread between 3 companies and makes enough to raise a family and fund a massive hobby farm. Helps to be in an area with a large fintech presence I imagine.
Very nice, yeah that’s the problem. I broke into AIX in the wholesale industry in early 2000’s so I have very few finance connections, which is where it all seems to be.
I have also been work from home for 7 years now and figured I’d have to go onsite for banks. That may have changed post covid. I will poke around and see what might be out there for me
Idk what the AIX job market is right now, but several years ago banks in central Europe poached employees back and forth just to reach minimum staff required.
The more important a job is, the less paid the work is. Conversely, the more bullshit the job is, the more pay there is.
Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
The historic high salary for COBOL Devs etc is also partially due to them mostly being old and extremely experienced senior devs
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Who would’ve thought a sector with gold flowing through its hands would be so stingy when it comes to updating their backend that they’d end up relying on a dying language, and call upon AI to update it for them rather than just paying a competent team to create and rigorously test a new backend in a modern language
One problem is that they need to put a price tag and therefore a timeline on such a project. Due to the complexity and the many unknown unknowns in theses decades worth of accumulated technical debts, no one can properly estimate that. And so these projects never get off and typically die during planning/evaluation when both numbers (cost and time) climb higher and higher the longer people think about it.
IMO a solution would be to do it iteratively with a small team and just finish whenever. Upside: you have people who know the system inside-out at hand all the time should something come up. Downside of course is that you have effectively no meaningful reporting on when this thing is finished.
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Yep I know a COBOL programmer and she drives a nice-ass Mercedes SUV and owns 2 houses. Making way more than I do.
Better learn COBOL now.
Right, you can make that kind of money when you have 40 years of Cobol behind you. But even for new entrants, $90k seems low. There had better be a premium for dealing with old bullshit, especially when you’re probably damaging your resume in the long run.
90k sounds pretty standard for inexperienced (although maybe not first job) devs in general for most markets. Throw in factors like experience or skills in low supply and that changes pretty fast.
I know that COBOL isn’t going away anytime soon, but most companies have seen the writing on the wall for a long time. Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underway. Some places even have a surplus of COBOL devs because of it. But there are countless places where it can’t be replaced, at least not reasonably.
The only way a COBOL dev is making $90k after 5 years is if there are very specific fringe benefits that make them not want to move along, or they are extremely naive about the market.
Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underw
Rewrites are extremely risky though, and some companies don’t want to risk it. That COBOL code probably has 40 years worth of bug fixes and patches for every possible edge/corner case. A rewrite essentially restarts everything from scratch.
Do you know of a decent sized company that successfully migrated away from COBOL? I’d be interested in reading a whitepaper about how they did it, if such a thing exists.
That’s because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them “yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you”. Here in Europe, they’ll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you’ve got a grateful new dev who doesn’t know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.A surprising number of people don’t know about levels.fyi
Go to levels.fyi, find some companies and compare at your level. For a long time I was like “ain’t no way these numbers are accurate, people are getting paid that much?” YES THE NUMBERS ARE ACCURATE; your company’s excuses for a shitty raise this year (“blah blah market conditions, blah blah you are already on the upper end of your band, let’s work on a promotion next year”) are bullshit.
I wish they would include the “non-professional” professions. I bet I could have gotten a better pay as a chef if I had any idea what other chefs made at the time.
Does Glass Door have non-office jobs listed? I haven’t looked on there in quite a while but it was the same idea in a more general sense.
I don’t know. They want me to sign up before I’m allowed to look at anything.
Sadly this doesn’t include my profession (Industrial Automation). Do you know of other alternatives?
You could try Glassdoor, but my understanding is that it’s not as accurate as levels.
programmers desperately need to unionize
For real. Even just talking to your fellow coding monkeys helps. It’s ironic that for example here in France, despite all our workers rights and revolutionary tradition, speaking about your salary is still a social faux-pas. And who benefits? Certainly not us.
I’d understanding actively pressuring someone to share their salary being a faux-pas. Admittedly, just sharing your own may make some people feel pressured to share theirs out of reciprocity, but just sharing your own salary generates nowhere near the same amount of pressure as outright telling someone “share your salary or you’re a bad person on the side of The Man!”
I hope the amount of people sharing their salary increases and talking about it becomes normalized.
Man I’d swim to Europe if some company wants to swoop me up and train me for something that valuable lol here in the States I have to not only pay for the training out the nose, but also find the time to do that while still working my regular job lol
Well, you could do like many US people and visit Ireland, I suppose :)
Is the collective noun for COBOL programmers, cobblers?
I would have gone with COBOLLICKERS
You definitely don’t want a blunt force trauma to this delicate area
Not how that format works, mate.
Another meme purist. If you guys keep this up you’re going to spawn a new variety of meme.
If it’s constructive then it should be interpreted as good faith.
Is saying “you’re doing it wrong” really constructive?
I didn’t think a step by step guide was really needed to correct it, but maybe I should?
The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.
You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.
The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.
Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?
It’s probably just a definition thing.
To me, constructive criticism means that the criticism doesn’t just point out failure, but that it then also shows how to correct that failure.
By itself, “you’re doing it wrong” is just destructive: it takes something apart, it destroys it. Without a subsequent “and here’s how you would do it right,” it doesn’t become constructive, it doesn’t help in putting things back together in the correct way.
Sure, as a first step, “you’re doing it wrong” is completely justified when something is actually wrong.
But without the second step - the constructive part - it just doesn’t constitute constructive criticism. By itself, it’s just criticism.
Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).
I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…
I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?
I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.
Works for me.
I think the text should be combined into one sentence, which would be run-on but still give the impression that both images refer to one person, as it should be.
Ah, I understand now
Misusing meme templates is a long programminghumor tradition.
We need strongly typed memes. This place is chaos.
Possibly better suited for Vanya and Five Drive By Each Other
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$60K doing what and where?
Probably anything outside the US.
That’s what I was thinking. I moved to Europe and my salary was halved. I’m making 70K euros. After three years of scratching this “living in Europe” itch, I’m ready to move back to the U.S. An entry level developer should be making no less than 90K in the land of the free.
Yep. Few people where I live envy the US, but if you’re a developer the money is no joke. You have to expect that eventually all those big American tech companies will start offshoring, given the crazy money they could save.
I moved from Australia to the USA since salaries for developers are so much higher here. I live in Silicon Valley which helps too. If you’re a senior developer (say 5+ years of experience) then a lot of the large companies here pay $200-300k/year salary plus $100-200k/year in company stock plus a bonus that’s 10-20% of salary if you get a good performance review.
Ugh. Holy shit I went into the wrong field 🥲 I was just a kid. I didn’t know better
I got lucky since I’ve been into computers and programming since I was 8 years old (late 90s). My first job when I was at school was a part-time developer at a tiny IT company that did consulting work. Since then, all my jobs have been software development jobs.
The fact that it pays well in places like Silicon Valley was a great bonus. I moved here 10 years ago (when I was 23) after I got a job offer, and the starting salary was literally double what I was getting paid in Australia at the time.
The job changes a bit as you get more senior - there’s more mentoring of junior devs, project planning, deciding what your team should focus on, etc. I still spend a lot of my time writing code though, and still enjoy it. :)
There’s some downsides to living in Silicon Valley. A lot of stuff is expensive (that applies for California in general, but especially here). Housing is extremely expensive too.
That’s what I tell fellow devs around here. Try the U.S. for one or two years, especially if they offer shares. Then move back. Profit!
€70k as a developer? That’s a middled aged EM salary here in Sweden
I bet. I’m assuming taxes are way higher up there too.
Unfortunately I have to ask, what’s the meaning of EM?
Engineering manager, the one responsible for a team
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Hang in there, friend! You’ll make it big sooner rather than later!
How many years experience? It took me a few years before I started making a decent wage.
Definitely keep honing your skills and applying around for different jobs, and taking jobs that you can use to “leapfrog” to other, even better jobs.
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Okay that is getting up in years. I was about there when I started to get more aggressive with the salary I was asking. You could probably start on the
developer I -> developer II -> senior developercareer path.Do you look at other jobs much? Do much networking? Talk to other devs about their salary? Even just grabbing a lunch with some workmates from time to time can help get you in the right mindset of recognising your worth.
Cobol is the B-52 of programming languages. Sure there are fancy and expensive new ones or there, but it’ll probably outlast them all.
That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s Fortran and B-52. Fortran is very good at what it does to this day. Cobol was never good.
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So move fast and break things, 60s edition.
Cobol is a Hornet. Still used for production in first-world countries, but basically just because of shitty, slow-moving institutions.
In my experiemce, Java shoots processing usage up while COBOL uses much lesser CPU / memory
Yo if you are doing COBOL systems maintenance for 90k you arent charging enough.
That’s all this meme means. Consultants on COBOL maintenance can make 90k in a week. This is not the area where companies pinch pennies.
My experience with Fintech and the financial sector is that they don’t care about how much, they only care about how fast.
They just have understanding of correct criteria of financial success, since they, eh, work with finances.
A lot of banks have bootcamps where they pick up unemployed people who might not have ever had tech experience in their life. They teach them COBOL and mainframe basics in a few months, and, if they do well, give them a shitty $60k annual job.
Source: know someone who went to one of these bootcamps and now works for a major us bank.
This has been going on for decades. My dad became a COBOL programmer in 1980ish after taking an aptitude test in answer to a newspaper ad. Y2K consulting was a pretty good gig.
So you’re saying you can get free training then just leave for a real paying company eh
I imagine they have some absurd contract that says they can’t leave for 89 years or whatever
There are some court cases going on right now about this type of thing. Generally, the payback is only allowed to be for the real cost of training, and only for a few years. So that 60k salary for 3 years is also the right amount to make you worth 150k anywhere else.
And I’d like to see that contract hold up in court lol
The trick to exploiting people is keeping them in fear and ignorance.
And people wonder why companies dont train undergrads anymore
Oh, no, educated workers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe companies should value their employees if you want company loyalty.
Oh no, job providers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe people should value their job providers if you want their loyalty.
spoiler
My time on Lemmy (and Reddit before) ironically make me appreciate communism less and less
Where do you learn this… Cobol?
My grandmother could teach you it, but she’s dead.
My cobolences.
RIP
at university in the 1980s
Wait, so there’s nowhere you can learn it now?
Doubtful, I was just joking about how it’s an older language that has become rare
Probably a few CS programs offer courses in it, if nothing else because it’s historically important. And I’m sure one could teach it to themself via books and documentation
I swear to god, companies are nowadays just picking the solution with the most buzzwords. Any compiler engineering student knows how to write a transpiler from one language to another, while getting this right is a cumbersome task, it still completly automated afterwards. Just hire a few compiler engineering phds and the job is done in at least half a year.
Look what i found after a quick google search:
You want to translate COBOL to another language? That exists as a commercial product! The complexity is not the syntax though, it is the environment and subsystems surrounding the code. A lot of COBOL is designed for mainframe systems, and emulating a mainframe is complex.
You also end up with code that is still written as if it were COBOL. The syntax for COBOL is the easy part and that is all you can easily replace. Afterwards you’re still stuck with the way of working and mindset, both of which are quite peculiar.
The company I work for recently looked at all of this, and we decided not to translate our code.
Just make the devs learn the language if they don’t know it already. What kind of shitty mid to senior dev can’t learn a new language in a reasonable amount of time.
I think it’s a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it’s C# because they’re C# senior devs. It’s not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other “why we use best practices” raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending. I can only help with so many design standards when you still see everything show up in a classes-and-subclasses mindset with hard-to-catch concurrency bugs. I actually caught a developer trying to spin up a child process to wait on a socket response.
So in FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.
Also, isn’t COBOL extremely fast ? Which is not necessarily true for newer languages
You’re probably thinking of Fortran, which is still used for hardcore number crunching in areas like physics.
Rust: am i a joke to you?
I think that’s mostly because of the systems COBOL usually runs on, not so much because of the language
I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.
