Comment by Ethee

I have a friend who works writing COBOL for a US state government, I sent him this post and this was his response:

I work in COBOL for government systems.

We upgraded our old mainframes to IBM Z16's, and we just got some new ones in recently for our backup server.

Part of the job is taking whatever they decide in legislation and translating that into code that processes whatever they decided to make law, from fees, suspensions, special legislation for certain areas, etc.

Our programming environment primarily uses TSO/ISPF and changeman for version control. We have access to IBM's IDz (previously RDz) as an IDE for development, and I would personally prefer to use that but haven't been able to get it installed on my work computer due to licensing issues. Part of security protocol is that we cannot use anything open-source, so VSCode with Zowe is, unfortunately, out of the picture.

We maintain a lot of old programs and modules, but we are also actively developing new programs as we expand our IT department - and yes, that is new COBOL programs. We have a Linux side as well which mainly deals with the web-side, but they still interact with the mainframe to call on modules - but all they are really doing is sending data to CICS to get data back. They do not know anything about the COBOL itself or how to program in it.