FNB Cobol Leanership

Good money to be made.

I think Cobol devs earn way more than Java devs at financial houses.
 
Flojo said:
Good money to be made.

I think Cobol devs earn way more than Java devs at financial houses.
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Perhaps, but because it's so industry-specific, one will find it difficult to move into anything else. Once you do COBOL, all you do is COBOL...
 
Mike Hoxbig said:
Perhaps, but because it's so industry-specific, one will find it difficult to move into anything else. Once you do COBOL, all you do is COBOL...
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True to an extent. It's not like there is a shortage of financial institutions which make use of the language, so moving around shouldn't be too tricky, interindustry that is. Cobol programmers are effectively a dieing breed though, companies are switching over to Java, C#, Node.JS as mainstream. Being an object-orientated language, it's to too hard to branch out to the aforementioned languages if required. In fact, you'll find companies try to attract those familiar with both Cobol and something like Java in order to convert their systems into something a little more modern.

If you're already a dev, learning Cobol may be advantageous. But I wouldn't start out in programming with Cobol.
 
Mike Hoxbig said:
Perhaps, but because it's so industry-specific, one will find it difficult to move into anything else. Once you do COBOL, all you do is COBOL...
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My uncle was a cobol dev from the early 80's, 2yrs before y2k he started working in the eu somewhere & took full advantage of y2k hysteria/compliance.

I'm no programmer but he explained some stuff to me and showed me reams of code, ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz :D
 
AntiGanda said:
lol

COBOL was a legacy language about 20 years ago. I'm surprised it hasn't been migrated yet.
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Just because it's old does not mean it's obsolete. fortran is almost 60yrs old and still being used today on supercomputers.
 
Hi guys. I just got an invite to do an aptitude test and possibly an interview this coming Friday for the same learnership program. I'm currently doing an internship that doesn't pay well and is only for 7 months. Do you know how long this program is for and approx how much it pays?
 
I Still code in COBOL. We use it for our back end systems. No other language comes close when it come to processing bulks of data in batch. I'm talking 2 million records plus in a batch run. COBOL is also one of the most accurate languages when it comes to complex calc's etc.
 
Drifter said:
I Still code in COBOL. We use it for our back end systems. No other language comes close when it come to processing bulks of data in batch. I'm talking 2 million records plus in a batch run. COBOL is also one of the most accurate languages when it comes to complex calc's etc.
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How does the language have any bearing on the data rate? As long as it compiles natively, I would expect similar performance.

Is there any reason that you say COBOL has more precision? I know that it uses packed decimal, but today's hardware can do 80-bit float arithmetic (about 19 digits of precision), relatively quickly and 64-bit very quickly - I've never seen a case where I've needed more precision. For exact arithmetic, C++ (and many other languages) can use things like the GMP library (or intels packed packed decimal library) quite seamlessly. The only thing I can think of is that there may still be hardware out there that does packed decimal super fast in hardware - if so, I wouldn't mind knowing what (it's not a language thing at this point though) - I would have guessed that most of those mainframes would be left in the dust even with software emulation.
 
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Drifter said:
I Still code in COBOL. We use it for our back end systems. No other language comes close when it come to processing bulks of data in batch. I'm talking 2 million records plus in a batch run. COBOL is also one of the most accurate languages when it comes to complex calc's etc.
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Its also one of the most infuriating and frustrating languages, ever . But yeah - as a Biztalk Developer with a COBOL background - I still have a soft spot for that beast.
 
Compton_effect said:
Its also one of the most infuriating and frustrating languages, ever . But yeah - as a Biztalk Developer with a COBOL background - I still have a soft spot for that beast.
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So you have also experienced the missing full stop, or the one that one that shouldnt be there :) ?
 
I learned how to code using COBOL. Before VB and. NET... It's better than ABAP in my opinion.
 
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