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

[0] https://research.ibm.com/blog/watsonx-code-assistant-for-z-i...

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.

They wouldn't hang around here though.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This was around 1999, and I was building a system for configuring and ordering custom PC's at a large distribution company. One of the feature requirements was that we display inventory over the various options. (ie: There are 373 20G disks in stock, but only 12 30G disks in stock). The idea was that this would let a customer ordering 200 machines know that they should pick the 20G disk if the wanted it now.

The way inventory at this company was done was via two systems. There was a normal SQL database that had access to a daily snapshot of inventory taken from a mainframe that always had the up to date data. With the mainframe taking a while to process queries, we used the less current SQL database for the majority of the UI, but took the time to query the mainframe once a customer was in the shopping cart. Customers might see a change during the flow, but it would at least let them see the most current data prior to committing to a purchase.

The mainframe query itself was implemented by someone else as a COBOL job that produced the required inventory numbers. From my point of view, it was just a limited sort of query conducted over a specialized JDBC driver. (Not necessarily the weirdest aspect of that design.... for a variety of reasons, we did the UI in ASP/VBScript, the back end using Microsoft's JVM invoked via COM Automation, and the SQL database link was via a dubious use of a JDBC/ODBC bridge to connect to SQL Server. It all worked, but not the most solid architecture.)

==

My only other mainframe experience was working as an intern for a utility company a few years prior (1991-1992). They used CDC Cyber mainframes to run the power grid, using something like 4MM lines of FORTRAN code. The dispatchers themselves interfaced to the system using consoles with 4 19" color displays running at 1280x1024. Heady stuff for 1991. (The real time weather radar screen was cool too, in an age before the internet made it common place.)

There’s not much maintenance work. There are very few bugs, as the core applications have been running for decades, most come up with interactions to external services.

Any major development projects are only in service of lower overall COBOL development time, like transitioning some business logic to database updates.

And there is a decommission plan for the mainframe, so plenty of work helping that team.

We work on Phoenix, government of Canada payroll system. If you google it up, you'll see some interesting coverage. However, the underlying peoplesoft ERP itself is rock solid at every other client I've served over last 25 years. Peoplesoft uses Cobol and sqr, as well as proprietary languages stored in database, application engine and peoplecode.

Key payroll processes are in Cobol. This is because of its tight integration with database and ability to manually control database cursors. We are very database oriented when it comes to performance. Our developers need to know the programming language, but also deep understanding of client business processes, and sql optimization. They also work closely with our dbas to ensure good performance. So our developers are technically proficient in Cobol and couple of other languages, but also very very strong in sql optimization, and understand clients payroll rules and can speak intelligently with compensation advisers and payroll processors.

I personally found that to be true for most Cobol programmers - whereas typical hacker news Dev seems very technology oriented and frequently moving, typical Cobol programmer is very business process aware and integrated with corporate line of business. They don't move as much for several reasons, but that deep awareness of client is one of them.

Edit: I shoild mention, while peoplesoft can and does work on mainframe, most of my clients are on windows, Linux, or AIX. COBOL is not quite as mainframe specific as it sometimes seems :-). See e.g.microfocus Cobol for a modern multi platform compiler.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479536

For some reason I think we’re all drawn to the idea of working with an older language. I wonder why!

- Item Database (SKU, UPC, attributes)

- Stock Status (Sales, Onhands, process sales transactions from POS systems)

- Replenishment (Create vendor and DC orders to stores)

- Reporting (Report sales and other performance data by stores, departments, classes, etc..)

- Pricing (make and maintain current and future price changes, send to store when needed).

- Many other applications (15+)

They have been saying they are going to get rid of these applications for over 20 years now. I am still waiting...

There are three flavors of COBOL that I deal with: PeopleSoft delivered, Vendor delivered, and University modified. Most of the work I do in COBOL breaks down to reading the code to determine why a given behavior is observed. Only once (in University modified code) have I needed to make an actual edit. The rest of the times I either modify the flow of information into the COBOL code or I modify the resultant after the code has run.

Most of our processes are EOD centric, we run a lot of batch jobs (mainly TSO, very little IMS). Integrations are mostly file based but we do both call and expose APIs (“regular REST APIs”) as well as consuming from and producing to Kafka among other things. We integrate with both mainframe and distributed systems on prem as well as “internal” systems hosted on cloud.

We use Git for source control but have a CI/CD solution that is built in house. Quite a lot of other infrastructure is also built in house.

I am mid 30s and am on the younger side looking at the mainframe area as a whole at my employer, however in my team we have several developers is in their 20/30s.

My background is mainly back- and frontend development on the Microsoft tech stack but I have worked, and do work, with whatever is at hand/required. But mostly stuff like .NET and SQL Server on the backend, and Angular/Vue/React on the front end before this.

Many megacorps still run AS/400 and it’s uptimes and performance is legendary.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I was mentored by folks more than twice my age that time.

zTPF runs the airlines, the model for real online transaction systems... Not SQL relational database shopping carts.

Botton line, everything is Assembler. It's all just bits.

a) the systems are very tightly coupled, like uber-monolith architecture, and it's hard to QA them without end-to-end testing through everything. Good luck getting anyone to refactor them because a1) they're going away and a2) they're so huge. Which leads into . . .

b) there's 40 years of undocumented business logic in there, or business logic that only exists in code comments. And it still makes billions of dollars a year. So good luck replicating 40 years of tribal knowledge in the new systems.

c) It was written by cowboy coders 40 years ago when the company was a startup, so no one can learn to work on it without first getting hired here. The joke is one of the original architects went and created his own dialect of COBOL.