Confession of a Cobol programmer

Last summer, Michael Vu, a 40-year-old independent IT consultant, found himself in a completely unexpected situation through his career.

He signed a three-week contract to help a large US retailer with a project do business reports. The initial work was very successful and the project was expanded. As a consequence, Vu suddenly sank into the world of Cobol programming language.

Yes, Cobol, the programming dinosaur was very popular in the 1980s of the last century. Cobol, notorious for its too complex syntax and very long code. That is Cobol.

Although he had never worked with Cobol before, Vu really wanted to learn a bit. In the US, people are witnessing the baby boomer generation (the booming generation of people who were born right after the 2nd World War) who is reaching retirement age in large numbers, Vu sees an opportunity. "I tell myself, even if only 0.1% of the baby boomer generation are Cobol programmers, that will also open a huge job market."

Vu's work on the project has been carried out, he realizes that the retailer has a lot of code written in Cobol that has been around for decades. And the next stage of this project depends on that code.

Vu is a trained and experienced person in C and C ++, so he jumps to learn Cobol quickly. And he also trained more skills to enhance his strategic value to this organization. "I went from being just a normal coder without knowing about their business becoming a person this company is relying on to extract business information from their code base," he said. . Now he spends 30% of his time working with Cobol, and he hopes to always maintain that level or even increase.

For Vu, working with Cobol feels a bit like I'm discovering a lost art. "The shock for me is that Cobol is still being used a lot, even if my customers are using the latest technologies in the enterprise like Java, C ++ and Visual Basic," Vu said.

Is there something going on here? Are reports about Cobol's death exaggerated?

About 75% of the data of businesses around the world is still processed in Cobol, and about 90% of all financial transactions in Cobol, according to Arunn Ramadoss, head of the program that connects Micro learning Focus International PLC , which provides software to help modernize Cobol applications.

Because a huge number of applications and infrastructures were previously installed, it would be too costly to try to replace all that code, he said. Instead, many companies are looking for ways to integrate Cobol with newer applications.

However, experienced Cobol programmers who can do the job best are dying or at least retired. In a Micro Focus survey with its customers in 2007, more than 75% of CIOs said they would need a lot of COBOL programmers over the next 5 years, and 73% said they had a period of time. difficult to find trained professionals about Cobol.

Labor market of older people

"There is no doubt that it is a challenge to find a Cobol programmer, who is not close to retirement age," said Dale Vecchio, vice president of applied development research at Gartner Inc. In 2004, the last time Gartner tried to list the number of Cobol programmers, the consulting firm estimated there were about 2 million Cobol programmers worldwide and this number decreased by 5% each year.

"Cobol will go downhill quickly in the next 10 years … when the generation booms baby (boomer) to retirement age and there is not enough population to make up," Vecchio noted.

As Vu's experience shows, this may mean a career opportunity for IT professionals who are willing to learn and work with Cobol. (How long these opportunities will last, however, is a controversial topic.)

We conducted a survey of Cobol programmers and companies working in the Cobol field and determined that this market now supports two types of careers:

• A new role emerges in which developers act as a bridge between Cobol code and new applications. That work requires those who understand Cobol, the business rules and processes that the old Cobol program is based on, and more modern languages ​​like Java.
• A traditional programming path in which employees maintain and repair old Cobol code and write new code, still in Cobol.

Cobol's communication role can be an exciting career path, Ramadoss said. "Cobol doesn't stop at Cobol," he said. "You can integrate it into any other modern technology."

With the emergence of service-oriented architecture, companies can easily reuse their Cobol code, according to Nate Murphy, president of Nate Murphy International, an IT services professional.

Murphy, now 66, who has worked with mainframes for decades and experienced Cobol programming, sees a Cobol value revival for the emergence of SOA and Language Environment of IBM. They provide a runtime environment for combining many different programming languages, including Cobol.

"Now you can expand and add subroutines to other Web-based features you need," he said. "All of this is amazing when you have a valuable asset in old Cobol programs, and you can expand them and expand their capabilities without having to write any new code."

Unconventional career paths have more traditional programming jobs – maintenance and repair of old code as well as new Cobol coding. While some companies are now moving this Cobol coding job to places like India – especially the maintenance of older code – many organizations want to keep a certain number of programmers in the United States. , especially if their work is the key to keeping critical business systems running smoothly.

That's where Stacy Watts, a 28-year-old senior programmer at Nationwide Insurance Group in Des Moines, is holding. She has programmed Cobol for about 7 years, and last year the company gave her a chance to remotely monitor a team of programmers in India. Watts designed the program and then transferred the design to Indian programmers so they could do it for her.

Watts said she was not worried that her job could be outsourced. Even with the cheap programmers on the other side of the hemisphere, "We still don't have enough people to be able to accomplish all the work," Watts said. Moreover, she saw the opportunity to manage a group of Indian developers by the company as a step toward a higher management role later.

Although Watts learned some of the school programming languages, including Visual Basic, C and Java, she was naturally attracted to COBOL. "The work with big computers seems easier for me," she said. "It means a lot to me."

Cobol programmers often cite that job security as one of the attractions in their career choices. Brian Vance, a 30-year-old mainframe programmer at Grange Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, started working at the company five years ago, maintaining and updating the old Cobol code. Currently, he is developing a new Cobol code for branches that provide insurance services in many different states.

The youngest of the 20 Cobol programmers at this company, Vance foresaw a stable and safe career. “I know it's an old man's game. I like the position to be younger in the market, ”he said. “There will be many retirees and no one to fill their positions. So, I think that my work is now really stable and valuable. "

John Walczak, a 31-year-old Cobol programmer at Indianapolis's Sallie Mae Inc , also said he was happy and safe in his job. After he graduated from Eastern Illinois University, Walczak wanted to work on web-related projects. But Sallie Mae hired him to work on the Cobol project, along with the promise that he would be able to move on to any other job at the company if he wanted to.

After a few years, he really had the opportunity to switch to a Web development team. But after getting a new job, Walczak was really surprised, because he didn't like it. “I think I am prepared to build Web sites and make graphics. But those things are already built, ”he said. Instead, he was assigned a back-end job "that means writing lots of code with Visual Basic and some .NET code." So he decided to go back to programming COBOL.

Now the company is trying to convince Walczak to turn to a higher role. After working at Sallie Mae for over 8 years, Walczak knows how the systems work. "So they want me to use that knowledge to help develop and design new projects," he said.

The problem is, Walczak isn't sure if he wants to switch to a new job. "I love programming. I like to write code, ”he said. “When my hands are tied to the keyboard to program, they are trying to lift me to higher management positions. I don't want that. ”

Cobol: will leave, but when?

Most observers agree that a knowledge of Cobol can help your career in the short term. But does COBOL exist long enough until you reach retirement age?

Companies participating in the Cobol market prefer to point to statistics – such as 75% of the world's business data is still in Cobol – to prove Cobol, and jobs related to Cobol, will remain very much in the coming years.

Dale Vecchio, an analyst with consulting firm Gartner, is not sure about that.

"I am seeing increasing interest in organizations about moving away from relying on IBM and Cobol mainframes," Vecchio said. “We have to accept that they can abandon large computers and switch to Windows or Unix or Linux. I hope this will continue for the next 5-7 years. ”

In addition, large companies are increasingly replacing customizable applications on mainframes such as human resource management, supply chain management – often written in Cobol – into packaged software from companies. as Oracle, he noted.

Jobs for Cobol are many

However, programming Cobol is still a useful skill for IT professionals who need it. "The world does not need 100,000 new Cobol developers, but it also needs thousands of new Cobol programmers," said Drake Coker, chief technology officer at Cobol at Micro Focus International .

"There are a lot of work out there for people who know how to write a system with new technology that integrates into an existing system," he added.

How to put Cobol into your skill set is another matter. Fewer US colleges and universities train Cobol. Over the past few years, both IBM and Micro Focus have taken the initiative to encourage universities to train more mainframe programmers. Through these programs, companies provide schools with free technologies and programs.

Although these efforts may help with retaining some of the courses to Cobol, Vecchio does not think they will do much to prevent a sharp decline of Cobol. These efforts, as he said, "are too few, and too late."

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