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Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

245 points by _false ↗ HN
COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?

61 comments

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andrelaszlo
I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.
PaulHoule
I knew a guy who wrote a lot of 360 assembler back in the day, never a COBOL programmer.
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degamad
I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services.

Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.

mjl-
What I'm wondering: Are the salaries high? Not just because you've been employed at the job for a long time with regular raises, but because it's hard to find developers.
zeeframe
I’m not a COBOL dev but I work with mainframes(z/OS). Most COBOL applications I’ve seen have been banking and insurance related with few exceptions. Most of them either run as a series of batch jobs or via transaction managers like IMS and CICS. Backends are usually sequential files(we call them datasets),DB2,VSAM(Virtual Storage Access Method) or DL/1(hierarchical DB that’s part of IMS). Quite a few places I’ve seen have run IBM MQ as well.

If changes are made to these systems it’s often due to changes in regulation or driven by changes in the business(new financial products being offered etc.

Off-topic: I’ve seen quite a few mainframe related posts on HN fly by over the years. I’ve been meaning to create an account and participate but I’ve only gotten around to it just now.

lstroud
It would be kinda cool if you’d create a CICS Hacker News UI. ;)
cedws
Do you think there’s any money in helping businesses modernise their stack as a consultant?
ralphc
What, if any, advantages that VSAM, IMS or DL/1 have over the SQL databases we're more familiar with here?
ecshafer
I have written cobol in the past. I worked at a financial company that had a decent amount of cobol devs around, with the primary database being DB2. The code is mostly financial transactions and record updates, basically CRUD code. Cobol was essentially the backend with the front end being Java and Javascript/Angular.
mtmail
Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel a new system was built in-house (no longer trusting external consultants) and his job was explaining what the system does. Probably well paid but he didn't seem to care, he just wanted to work less and retire on good terms.
forinti
I know some COBOL devs. They work in a bank.

They wouldn't hang around here though.

SirFatty
Global Shop ERP is written in Visual Cobol, believe it or not. Supposedly they are actively rewriting the eight million lines of code to C#.
RSHEPP
My mother and her husband are COBOL devs for a US state government. She works on the health insurance side for teachers and other state employees. Think claim processing.

Lots of batch jobs running at night. Their alert system is an actual human who calls my mom when jobs fail in the middle of the night.

It's high paying for the city they live in, but not high paying for software development. They will both have full retirement and healthcare for life, assuming the government can fulfill it. They are both fully remote since COVID too.

She's also worked for state lottery, teacher's retirement system and DOT.

edit: she says they have a SQL database, but mostly store in IBM IMS

gaws
> They will both have full retirement and healthcare for life, assuming the government can fulfill it

Are they not worried about getting DOGE'd?

slowmotiony
I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.
the_af
I worked with COBOL in banking, a lifetime ago. It was one of my first jobs.

Batch jobs, clunky and very verbose programs, nothing interesting. I... hated it.

ruralfam
Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was just one guy who knew enough to setup the CICS. If he got hit buy a bus... Well after about a year, the bus would not have mattered. Atari buried millions on unsold carts, and I went from working in a beautiful office complex next to Great America Park, to a windowless basement closet somewhere near Mountain View now making changess because the "forklift inventory" version was no longer needed. I know this is a bit off topic, but "COBOL" was the into I needed.
exabrial
Not Recently. 2010ish was working for an insurance processor that was actively writing thousands of lines and executing on z/OS with no plans to migrate.

I was part of team that was writing web applications that needed to call z/OS transactions. The IBM solution was to use their Transaction Gateway product, which cost a ton, and was slow as shit. We developed a framework that used annotations on the Java Side to map COBOL Records to Java Objects and invoke transactions over a TCP socket. Learning how to pack decimals and convert encodings was pretty cool. We ended up with a framework that was at least a zillion times faster than the IBM solution. Left that job though as the company was is distress and was losing customers (health plans). They eventually folded.

calvinmorrison
not cobol but we do a hell of a lot of business basic.
mvdwoord
Not a COBOL developer, but working at a sizeable bank I witnessed the phasing out of their mainframes and AS400 systems. They ran some critical systems, both in retail and wholesale banking. They either converted to java, and optimized that code, but some COBOL code from the mainframe, and all of the AS400 stuff was converted into Micro Focus COBOL, which runs on Windows, which could be hosted on our Private Cloud. I worked on helping them migrate to our cloud infra, which was an interesting exercise. There was a very tangible cultural gap between the people maintaining and developing these applications and the rest of the organization.
proxysna
Not me, but not even 5 years ago one of my friends was working on Cobol codebase running on IBM zOS. It did not last long, but as far as know they had a decent time.
wglb
This is in my past, so no COBOL recently but in one of my first consulting gigs I wrote several business programs in RPG III. Which is the nightmare that you might imagine it is. Think plugboards. Halfway through the IBM guy came by and installed COBOL and wow what a difference. My last act was to recommend that they get a computer department. And so Tom Monaghan called IBM
jamesponddotco
My brother works with COBOL for a bank here in Brazil, he is young (in his 20s), started before finishing his degree. Pay is poor, hours are insane, he is overworked as hell, and anything “modern”, like git, is out of the question.

He’s trying to learn Go now and modernize himself to see if he can get out. I’m trying to help as much as I can. Hopefully, he’ll land a job somewhere else this year.

reaperducer
Any active COBOL devs here?

A legitimate question, but so far not many answers, and they're mostly from people who know people who know COBOL devs. This is to be expected.

Demographically, COBOL devs skew older, and there aren't a lot of graybeards left on HN. This place used to be full of them, and they always had interesting and unusual insights and techniques to share. Those days are long gone.

IMO, Graybeards have largely left HN for a few reasons:

- They're tired of being shouted down by the Reddit-quality ageism that lingers through this forum.

- They're mature enough to no longer be interested in chasing every little tech fad as if their lives depended on it, and that's 90% of what HN has become.

- As most older people do, have other things in their lives that are more interesting than work. Family. Children. Hobbies. Traveling. Service. The world is full of things more rewarding than being terminally online, or being reminded of your day job.

I applaud your curiosity, but you're standing in a church asking, "Where are all the atheists?" COBOL devs aren't here. And where they are is likely not online.