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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

These systems will be fixed and then tossed out

Nothing is infeasible to replace, it might be costly, but not infeasible

And of course IBM is happy to get paid millions to keep backward compatibility on the systems they sell

Nobody wants to invest their time learning a dying platform that is good for nothing but a dead end job at a bank and won't teach anything usable in any form of modern system (hope you like wearing a tie for your job as well)

(Fortran is still used, z/OS might be dying down as well but it runs some modern software)

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That's exactly what we were told in 1996 (21 years ago that is) when I entered my engineering school: to disregard Cobol and Fortran, because, you know, OLD tech. Won't matter much longer.

If the cost of training peons to make it last and run is less than the cost of rebuilding it, be it from scratch or piece by piece, it will matter longer (that's the point of view of insurances, banks and big corps today, and what's still happening in the IT industry).

Latin is dead not because no one uses it anymore, but because you're limited in what you can do with it.

They might be maintained for a foreseeable time, but if you take a job maintaining them you've committed your entire career to only do that. That's not appetizing to young engineers.

> These systems will be fixed and then tossed out

Hahaha, nope. It's easier and cheaper to train a copule of COBOL programmers than replace the systems that run COBOL.

At a previous company I worked for, it was estimated that the cost to replace just a single COBOL based system was upwards of $50 million.

Not only that, banks are notoriously risk averse, especially with their software. They are very reluctant to change things that already work.

I've taken to learning more about both languages so I can work at the banks that use these. Job stability is #1 for me and if it's at a "dead end" job in tech, at this point I don't see a risk as long as my relevant skills are kept reasonably up to date on the side job/home lab.

> These systems will be fixed and then tossed out

> Nothing is infeasible to replace, it might be costly, but not infeasible

Too costly. Which does make it infeasible.

Five minutes of downtime can result in multi-million dollar profit losses. (At least that's the quote I was given by the CTO when he was explaining the scope of my role when I was consulting at a major Australian bank).

When you have literally millions of transactions a second you need to handle, building a new system to handle the same:

* Regulations * Specifications (Some thousands of pages) * Edge cases * Load

Turns into a multi-year, multi-million dollar operation that will likely be outclassed by the old system by the time it is ready.

No manager in their right mind would approve such a project, no matter how forward-thinking it may be.

Not impossible, but entirely infeasible.

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