COBOL programmers are still in the game

COBOL programmers back in the game

compiled from the post by ITworld

You're wrong if you think COBOL programmers are doomed to go the way of the Edsel. Despite predictions to the contrary, the world kept revolving around its axis after Y2K. Yet, the job market for COBOL programmers suddenly plunged -- and so did their salaries. However, this decline has since been stemmed thanks to the Internet's transition into a sprawling shopping mall selling everything from toothbrushes to tractors.

In the late 1990s, organizations fired up Y2K remediation projects and sought COBOL programmers to immunize legacy (database management systems running on mainframes or minicomputers) business applications against Y2K-related problems. Today, companies are finding that they need help integrating these legacy systems with new applications.

A couple of years ago Bill Lockhart, 63, a veteran COBOL programmer from Los Altos, Calif., was hard pressed to find a company that would take advantage of his more than 30 years of experience. His experience as a COBOL programmer dates to 1966 when he worked as a systems programmer. More recently, as a database specialist, he worked on several assignments for IBM writing in COBOL, PL/I, REXX, and assembly language.

"The tables have turned," chuckles Lockhart. "IT industries need my COBOL skills to get going on the Web."

Most of the world's business data, approximately 75 to 85 percent, is written in COBOL," adds Bill Payson, president and CEO of Senior Techs, an Internet-based job bank for experienced IT professionals in Campbell, Calif. "That translates to some hundreds of billions of lines of code."

COBOL is used in some manner by almost all Fortune 500 companies. Many of these companies have a large pool of COBOL-based applications that are primary business systems. E-business requires these systems to be integrated and connected to the outside world.

"With the future of all commerce linked to the Internet, companies with massive databases know that success depends on the ability to move data in and out of the Internet," Payson explains.

Paul Halpern, director of traditional development solutions at Merant, a Web-enabling training company in Mountain View, Calif., maintains that, "If all the COBOL programs stopped working, the US economy would collapse." And he points out: "Nine out of ten of the top Internet brokers use COBOL with CICS [Customer Information Control Systems]. Chances are that when you use an ATM card you are starting a COBOL/CICS process. An IBM report published last year indicates 30 billion COBOL/CICS transactions are executed worldwide each day, more than the total number of Web pages hit each day."

COBOL skills future in DEMAND

COBOL skills needed in the future

An article -- By Matt Stansberry, News Editor


To paraphrase German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, COBOL is dead. Or at least that's what some people in the IT world believe. It's a legacy language with relatively little new development taking place.

But the growth of the mainframe of late, combined with the staggering amount of COBOL running currently, has some experts are questioning whether the 800-pound gorilla is really dead. So Rockville, Md.-based Micro Focus International Ltd. decided to poke it with a stick to find out.

According to preliminary results of Micro Focus' survey of 750 mainframers in the U.S. and Canada, 41% name COBOL as a principal programming language by an approximate 25% margin over Java, the next most popular language. Preliminary results also find 52% of mainframe applications are still written in COBOL. ((Content component not found.))

The survey also found the median age of the COBOL programmer is 45-49, leading to the belief that there will be a growing knowledge shortage of COBOL programmers in the next decade.

Which raises the question: If your son or daughter were enrolled in a computer science program, would you encourage him or her to take classes in COBOL?

As it happens, Mark Lillycrop, CEO of U.K.-based Arcati Research and Publishing, has a nephew that is a first-year computer science student, and he has been encouraging him to pursue mainframe skills.

"COBOL is like an invisible giant. There's reported to be 180 billion-200 billion lines of code out there, processing 75% of commercial business. Few companies are keen to throw away the hundreds or thousands of man-years that have been invested in mature, high-performance COBOL code. Instead, they are integrating and building bridges between COBOL, .NET and J2EE [Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition], using service-oriented architectures to preserve the strengths of the legacy code while benefiting from Web-oriented development tools," Lillycrop said.

Ron Kizior, assistant professor Loyola University Chicago School of Business, ISOM area, worked on the Micro Focus survey. According to Kizior, the aspect that surprised him the most was the small number of mainframe shops that had gone to the Web. He'd expected up to 40%, but the numbers showed only 10%.

Despite that small number, Lillycrop and Kizior said the ability to integrate COBOL with Web-oriented development tools would be the skill to have in the future.

"It's not enough to know COBOL; the real winners are those who understand how to integrate with newer technologies. Some of the more enlightened universities are trying to get to grips with this emerging requirement, and are bringing the necessary mainframe components back onto the syllabus," Lillycrop said.



Loyola University Chicago is offering workshops on COBOL integration with .NET this summer, according to Kizior. He said it's harder to convince university administrators to consider COBOL than it is to persuade students.

"COBOL gives you a better understanding of what programming is. It's like taking the classics. It gives you a well-rounded background," Kizior said.

COBOL will be at the center of the enterprise for many years to come, with a huge ongoing support requirement. According to Lillycrop, when the current population of 50-something COBOL specialists finally retire, people with the right combination of skills will be able to name their price.