A Cobol Programmer's confession

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Last summer, Michael Vu, a 40-year-old independent IT consultant, found himself at an awkward time in his life. He signed a three-week corporate statement project contract with a large U.S. retailer. As the work progressed smoothly and their contracts continued, Vu suddenly entered the world of COBOL, and, yes, COBOL, the dinosaur-class programming language of the 80 's hit, known for its hyper-complex syntax and super long code.

Although VU had never used COBOL, but had taken the idea of learning COBOL, when the generation of the birth-peak born in the Second World War was about to retire on a massive scale, VU saw the opportunity, and thought, even if only 0.1% of the generation were Cobol programmers, that was a big opportunity.

As the project progressed, Vu learned that the retailer had been using Cobol for more than 10 years. The next phase of this project will use Cobol. Vu used to learn C and C + +, so he immediately went into Cobol and quickly got the skills to make him more valuable in the organization, and Vu said, "I've grown from a common, unknown programmer to a business that can extract business knowledge based on their code, And thus get the people that the company relies on. He now spends 30% of his working time in Cobol, and looks forward to maintaining that ratio, or even higher.

For Vu, using COBOL is like discovering a lost art, and Cobol is a shock to me that it's still heavily used, even if my clients are using the latest Enterprise java,c++ or VB. This means that the report on the impending death of Cobol is greatly exaggerated. According to Arunn Ramadoss of Micro Focus, 75% of the world's business data is still being processed using COBOL and 90% of financial transactions using COBOL.

Given the widespread use of COBOL, the cost of replacing these codes will be very high, whereas many companies are seeking to integrate Cobol with new programs. However, those most experienced Cobol programmers are dying, or retiring. A 2007 Micro Focus survey of customers showed that 75% of CIOs said they needed more Cobol programmers in 5 years, and 73% of CIOs found it increasingly difficult to find a well-trained COBOL programmer.

' There's no question, ' said Dale Vesshio of Gartner, ' that it's hard to find a COBOL programmer with a retirement age, and in 2004, Gartner counted about 2 million of COBOL programmers at the time, and this number is decreasing at 5% a year. In the next 10 years, COBOL will soon decline, and with the retirement of World War II, the population supplement is seriously inadequate.

Vu's experience shows that this is an opportunity for it people who are willing to learn Cobol, though. It is doubtful how long this opportunity will last (see the following article "Cobol:going, but when?").

' We did a survey of COBOL programmers and companies using COBOL, and found that the COBOL job market currently contains two types: Murphy Analysys, an IT service company, said.

First, a bridge between old COBOL code and new programs requires people to understand COBOL, understand the business logic that old COBOL programmers rely on, and move new programming languages, such as Java.

The second is to maintain the old COBOL code and write new COBOL code.

The former is an interesting job, says Ramadoss, COBOL is more than COBOL, and you can integrate it with any modern technology. With the advent of service-oriented architectures, it is easier for organizations to reuse their Cobol code.

Murphy, a 66-year-old who has worked in the mainframe and COBOL fields for decades, has seen the Cobol recovery from SOA and IBM's multiple-development language operating environment. Now, you can extend or add other web-based functionality to Cobol, and you can extend their functionality without having to write new code.

Another type of work related to COBOL is the maintenance of old COBOL code or the writing of new code, which some companies outsource to countries such as India, in particular the maintenance of old COBOL code. There are also a number of companies that retain a certain amount of programmers within the United States, especially when their work is important to the business.

The 28-year-old Stacy Watts is a senior development engineer at Nationwide Ping Company in Des Moines. She's been working on the Cobol program for 7 years, and last year, the company arranged for her remote inspector a development team in India, Watts the program, and then split the specific code work for the Indian programmers to write. ' She's not worried about the outsourcing company taking her job, ' says Watts. ' Even with the offshore programmer, we still don't have enough people to finish all the work. ' In addition, she sees the task of leading the Indian team as an administrative role.

Although Watts learned a variety of programming languages at school, including Vb,c and Java, she was eventually attracted to COBOL, who said that COBOL was the easiest way to get to the mainframe, which was more meaningful to me. COBOL programmers often choose COBOL as an easy way to keep their jobs, and this year's 30-year-old mainframe programmer Brian Vance began 5 years ago to work for Grange Ping Company in Ohio Chau, Columbus City, to maintain, upgrade old COBOL code, and now , he is writing new Cobol code for the company's branch offices in other continents.

The youngest of 20 Cobol programmers in this company, Vance is very optimistic about the stability of the job, he said, I know this is the site of the old people, I am happy to be a young member of the market, the elderly people retire, no one can replace them, so I think my job is very safe.

John Walczak, a 31-year-old Cobol programmer at Sallie Mae Inc in Indianapolis, is also satisfied with the stability of his work. After graduating from East Illinois University, he wanted to do Web development, but Sallie Mae hired him to develop Cobol and promised to let him run around the company and do something else.

After a few years, he did have a chance to join a team to do WEB development, but to Walczak surprise, he didn't like the job, I thought it was designing the web and drawing it, but it was someone else's job, and I had to do the code behind the page, using VB or other. NET code. Eventually, Walczak back to Cobol development.

Now, the company persuaded Walczak to do more cohesive work because it has been done for 8 years and Walczak knows the whole system, and they let me use that knowledge in project development and design. The problem is, I can't guarantee that I will like the new job, I like programming, I like my two hands touch the keyboard, they want me to do something else, I am not happy.