Despite what pundits might have led us to believe over the past 20 years, the mainframe is not going to disappear any time soon. What is going to change, however, is the mainframe product environment. Organisations need to have plans in place for either migrating or maintaining their current set-ups in the changing environment.
"Although firms are vocal in their dissatisfaction of the costs of maintaining them, legacy mainframes continue to run core business functions for medium, large, and Global 2000 companies," said Phil Murphy, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
And yet the prevailing questions concerning moving from the mainframe remain about Cobol versus Java or Cisco versus IBM Websphere, rather than more fundamental issues.
"If a company decides to stick with its current system, then they have to make an investment in ensuring they will still have the required skill sets (eg Cobol) in place within the next 10 years," said Dale Vecchio, research vice-president at analyst firm Gartner.
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I love these misconceptions about COBOL. COBOL was a great language and still is but...
am a fairly recent graduate, and guess what I got my first job as a COBOL
developer. I have been a COBOL developer for three years since graduating.
I can truly say I wish I stayed away from COBOL and so should all you recent
graduates.
It really doesn’t matter whether or not there are 70 billion lines of COBOL
and all that other stuff; if you can’t get a job in this area (trust me I’ve
been looking). All you have to do is type COBOL in a job search (and there
we have it – the last time I got 100 hits) – “COBOL IS DEAD” if you want to
get a job. When you narrow down your search to say London and you only get
about 12 hits – so if you want to work as a software developer stay away
from COBOL.
It really doesn’t matter if some developer says “COBOL is not dead, I’ve
recently got a job in COBOL”. These people probably been programming in
COBOL for a life time (that’s like 25 years) so you are competing with these
guys for those handful of jobs.
It really doesn’t matter if one says “there will be plenty of jobs when
these old people retire and a company will give you loads of money if you
have COBOL experience”. They may give people with COBOL skills loads of
money to fix a bug but how often do these bugs cause faults (remember if its
working don’t touch it). So you maybe sitting unemployed for years before
anything goes wrong, waiting for your one off big contract payment (sounds
like too much of a risky investment).
Anyway I’ve been looking for work out their and finding it very hard (almost
impossible) to find a job. I am a First Class graduate and have a Masters
and even with these academics three years of doing COBOL has crippled my
chances. I wish I had not done COBOL and stayed with the skills (what you
should be learning at university) that have jobs. I have got 3 years COBOL
and someone has 3 years of Java or C or C# etc.. so I am out of the
competition when looking for jobs. Don’t listen to those that say it don’t
matter what the language is (because it does), all you have to do is look at
the job specs (they generally mention the programming language because it
really does matter).
I am now hoping to build on those skills at university and then will keep
trying to apply for jobs. I am also hoping to do some courses to refresh my
knowledge in areas I have neglected over the last three years (which from my
experience you don’t get from COBOL and my opinion is this language should
not be taught at university). Certainly its IT and you have too keep up
with recently skills set (that’s RECENT!! skills set), but why get into the
position I am in and many (I hope not too many) recent graduates may be in.
I know this is very negative and may not read well, but COBOL has made it
very difficult for me to forward my career and I really don’t want this to
happen to any other graduate.
Basically “COBOL is truly dead” if you look at it from the perspective of
your career. Go out there, do the research and see the truth for yourself !!