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Comment by phrotoma | Hacker News Reader

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into.

Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and thousands of interlocking COBOL programs that do everything from moving files between partner banks all over the world, moving money between accounts, compounding interest, and extracting a metric shitton of every type of fee imaginable.

If you know z/OS there's work available until your retirement. Miserable, pointless, banal, and archaic legacy as fuck mainframe work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS

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I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.

Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land.

A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence.

And that was circa 2010.

One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.

I don't think "know COBOL" is enough. I'm pretty sure I can learn COBOL in a week. It's more about "know COBOL and know all this old stuff like CLIs, etc, and know all these old approaches".

Typically it's not just about knowing COBOL as a language, the bottleneck is having real expertise wrt. highly specific, fiddly proprietary frameworks that are implemented on top of COBOL.

Amazing to know AI has eliminated this role that used to have blank cheque.

Not sure if this is still the case, but Dillard's (US retailer) had a COBOL training program for undergrads as recently as six years ago

> purpose built gear like Tandem

Tandem! Now there's a name i haven't heard in a long time. A college friend of mine worked with some of their stuff right out of college and I still remember him telling me about it. It seemed like magic, we were both floored with the capabilities.

/we were in our early 20s and the inet was just taking off so there were lots of "magic" everywhere

About Tandem :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSSB7ZTSXH4

The Remarkable Computers Built Not to Fail by Asianometry

is it that bad? maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)

Man ... this question hits me really hard. I was absolutely miserable by the end of my years at the bank, and the part that really fucked me up was that (at the time) I could not understand why all my colleagues weren't.

Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get degrees" crowd who just want to clock in, clock out, keep their head down, and retire with a nice pension.

I wanted to work on sexy technology, wrangle clouds, contribute to open source, and hack in modern languages.

I have many friends who are still at that bank 20 yrs later. They're all directors of this that or the other thing, still just grinding out some midlevel whatever career and cruising comfortably. If that ticks all your boxes then by all means go hit up a bank job.

By the time I left I couldn't drink enough liquor in a day to rinse the stench of that job off me. If I hadn't managed to slip that place I'd be dead of liver failure by now.

It's the secret for a long life for some folks, but it ain't for everybody.

Fresh out of college, I had an interview for a job working with COBOL. There were classes being held to teach people development, as well as how to maintain existing COBOL software. It was between myself and another recruit, and that other recruit already had COBOL experience. Naturally, I was not chosen, over someone who already have knowledge of the working language being used.

Although I probably don't make nearly as much as that COBOL developer over 20 years later, I would be willing to bet that I am happier and haven't locked myself into a specific technology the way that developer probably has. Money is great, but if you actually care about what you do, I expect that being stuck on the same codebase for years isn't too satisfying (at least on code you didn't have a hand in creating from the very start). Too many people translate money into happiness, and I guess there is a balance there, but usually it's not possible to maintain happiness based off money when you do the same thing day in and day out.

You don't want to work for IBM unless your life is already over. Been there, done that, never again. It's depressing as hell. Your manager doesn't understand what you do, and they think that once your contract expires you'll be sitting around for weeks waiting for them to renew it.

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