Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

Very old coder here. Wrote COBOL to help Atari add features to a inventory processing system to account for the fact that "inventory" intially was items received at the loading dock, fork-lifted to the shipping dock and shipped. So "inventory" needed to be booked immediately as sales. Now I dabble mostly with Python and JS/HTML. My memory of the Atari gig was that the most critical part was the CICS code. There was just one guy who knew enough to setup the CICS. If he got hit buy a bus... Well after about a year, the bus would not have mattered. Atari buried millions on unsold carts, and I went from working in a beautiful office complex next to Great America Park, to a windowless basement closet somewhere near Mountain View now making changess because the "forklift inventory" version was no longer needed. I know this is a bit off topic, but "COBOL" was the into I needed.

My mother and her husband are COBOL devs for a US state government. She works on the health insurance side for teachers and other state employees. Think claim processing.

Lots of batch jobs running at night. Their alert system is an actual human who calls my mom when jobs fail in the middle of the night.

It's high paying for the city they live in, but not high paying for software development. They will both have full retirement and healthcare for life, assuming the government can fulfill it. They are both fully remote since COVID too.

She's also worked for state lottery, teacher's retirement system and DOT.

edit: she says they have a SQL database, but mostly store in IBM IMS

I work with a lot of COBOL dinosaurs in the bank, I often like to watch them work on their 16-colors IBM z/OS host terminals, it's quite mesmerizing. Sometimes they show me some interesting code that was written before I was alive (I'm 36), or tell me stories about big mainframe incidents in the '80s, where they would get called in the middle of the night and flown to a different country to fix a bug because there was no remote desktop back then.

I’m not a COBOL dev but I work with mainframes(z/OS). Most COBOL applications I’ve seen have been banking and insurance related with few exceptions. Most of them either run as a series of batch jobs or via transaction managers like IMS and CICS. Backends are usually sequential files(we call them datasets),DB2,VSAM(Virtual Storage Access Method) or DL/1(hierarchical DB that’s part of IMS). Quite a few places I’ve seen have run IBM MQ as well.

If changes are made to these systems it’s often due to changes in regulation or driven by changes in the business(new financial products being offered etc.

Off-topic: I’ve seen quite a few mainframe related posts on HN fly by over the years. I’ve been meaning to create an account and participate but I’ve only gotten around to it just now.

2075 HN: Ask HN: Any active Java devs here? What LLM do you use?

Not a COBOL developer, but working at a sizeable bank I witnessed the phasing out of their mainframes and AS400 systems. They ran some critical systems, both in retail and wholesale banking. They either converted to java, and optimized that code, but some COBOL code from the mainframe, and all of the AS400 stuff was converted into Micro Focus COBOL, which runs on Windows, which could be hosted on our Private Cloud. I worked on helping them migrate to our cloud infra, which was an interesting exercise. There was a very tangible cultural gap between the people maintaining and developing these applications and the rest of the organization.

Apropos of nothing in particular, there's an older HN thread about "Good resources for learning COBOL" that some folks here might find interesting. OK, calling it a "thread" is over-stating things, but still...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479536

My father is 75 and he still works, has his own software development company with his own back-office program written in cobol. He started a company back in 1991 with two other cobol programmers, they are retired now, and while almost all of the code they wrote has been replaced with c# code by younger programmers there are still some parts of the code written in cobol that he still maintains.

Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel a new system was built in-house (no longer trusting external consultants) and his job was explaining what the system does. Probably well paid but he didn't seem to care, he just wanted to work less and retire on good terms.

Not Recently. 2010ish was working for an insurance processor that was actively writing thousands of lines and executing on z/OS with no plans to migrate.

I was part of team that was writing web applications that needed to call z/OS transactions. The IBM solution was to use their Transaction Gateway product, which cost a ton, and was slow as shit. We developed a framework that used annotations on the Java Side to map COBOL Records to Java Objects and invoke transactions over a TCP socket. Learning how to pack decimals and convert encodings was pretty cool. We ended up with a framework that was at least a zillion times faster than the IBM solution. Left that job though as the company was is distress and was losing customers (health plans). They eventually folded.

I haven't worked in COBOL, but I've worked with it.

This was around 1999, and I was building a system for configuring and ordering custom PC's at a large distribution company. One of the feature requirements was that we display inventory over the various options. (ie: There are 373 20G disks in stock, but only 12 30G disks in stock). The idea was that this would let a customer ordering 200 machines know that they should pick the 20G disk if the wanted it now.

The way inventory at this company was done was via two systems. There was a normal SQL database that had access to a daily snapshot of inventory taken from a mainframe that always had the up to date data. With the mainframe taking a while to process queries, we used the less current SQL database for the majority of the UI, but took the time to query the mainframe once a customer was in the shopping cart. Customers might see a change during the flow, but it would at least let them see the most current data prior to committing to a purchase.

The mainframe query itself was implemented by someone else as a COBOL job that produced the required inventory numbers. From my point of view, it was just a limited sort of query conducted over a specialized JDBC driver. (Not necessarily the weirdest aspect of that design.... for a variety of reasons, we did the UI in ASP/VBScript, the back end using Microsoft's JVM invoked via COM Automation, and the SQL database link was via a dubious use of a JDBC/ODBC bridge to connect to SQL Server. It all worked, but not the most solid architecture.)

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My only other mainframe experience was working as an intern for a utility company a few years prior (1991-1992). They used CDC Cyber mainframes to run the power grid, using something like 4MM lines of FORTRAN code. The dispatchers themselves interfaced to the system using consoles with 4 19" color displays running at 1280x1024. Heady stuff for 1991. (The real time weather radar screen was cool too, in an age before the internet made it common place.)

I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.