If it’s anything like legacy public service code in my country it’s not just that, it’s also dealing with terrible organisational culture, d-grade devs, c-grade contractors and corrupt management that let it get that way (as millions are dumped on the contractors, as it turns out).
Some days I wish an ultra virus would take out computers as we know it so we’d be forced to start again with what we know now, namely not creating these monolithic nasty monsters.
I’m not saying you can’t write a monster in node (nor would I recommend writing complex apps in it) but modern systems are somewhat less monolithic, if a component is garbage rebuild it, run unit/integration tests and push to business to verify. You can’t do that when your application is such a black box even the devs don’t truly know how it works, which often seems to be the case with legacy cobol.
Yeah, did my time working in consulting for state gov bureaus. Some of the worst working environments I've ever been in. Asshole, down-right criminal managers. IT actively pirating software. Computers literally falling apart.
Not sure you could pay me enough to go back. Maybe for something ludicrous, like $3mil/yr and mutual termination at any time. I could probably put up with it for 4 months.
These places that "can't find COBOL programmers" need to stop blaming universities and start taking a harder look at themselves.
Yes and no remote work as far as I am aware of these things. It just sucks. If it wouldn't suck, I would've went into it: I like retro and COBOL is not a hard language to learn, really, it is not.
If it’s anything like legacy public service code in my country it’s not just that, it’s also dealing with terrible organisational culture, d-grade devs, c-grade contractors and corrupt management that let it get that way (as millions are dumped on the contractors, as it turns out).
Some days I wish an ultra virus would take out computers as we know it so we’d be forced to start again with what we know now, namely not creating these monolithic nasty monsters.
Cool we'd have a bunch of new monsters based on a super old version of nodejs instead.
I’m not saying you can’t write a monster in node (nor would I recommend writing complex apps in it) but modern systems are somewhat less monolithic, if a component is garbage rebuild it, run unit/integration tests and push to business to verify. You can’t do that when your application is such a black box even the devs don’t truly know how it works, which often seems to be the case with legacy cobol.
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Yeah, did my time working in consulting for state gov bureaus. Some of the worst working environments I've ever been in. Asshole, down-right criminal managers. IT actively pirating software. Computers literally falling apart.
Not sure you could pay me enough to go back. Maybe for something ludicrous, like $3mil/yr and mutual termination at any time. I could probably put up with it for 4 months.
These places that "can't find COBOL programmers" need to stop blaming universities and start taking a harder look at themselves.
Yes and no remote work as far as I am aware of these things. It just sucks. If it wouldn't suck, I would've went into it: I like retro and COBOL is not a hard language to learn, really, it is not.
This. HN and other places love to regurgitate this was the reason people didn't learn cobol.
The real reason is that most companies that don't bother to move away from either physical or emulated cobol systems just do not care.
They certainly do not care enough to pay market wages.