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

234 points _false | 1 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.22s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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mvdwoord ◴[18 Jul 25 14:40 UTC] No.44605163[source]▶
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.
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datpuz ◴[18 Jul 25 14:43 UTC] No.44605197[source]▶
Can you describe the cultural gap? I haven't really met these folks in the wild, so I'm curious what the programmers of yore were like.
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1. mvdwoord ◴[18 Jul 25 15:17 UTC] No.44605650[source]▶
I would say these people were in a relationship with the mainframe, if that makes sense. And also having worked at IBM in the past where I sat adjacent to the mainframe support team for Business Services, I totally get it. Mainframes are awesome if you ask me, and in a sense we have been trying to reinvent a lot of its goodness with "commodity" x86 hardware.

From a technical-cultural perspective it was mostly sulkiness, and a complete and utter lack of embracing the paradigms of distributed computing. Also, like most internal clouds, there were plenty of issues as it was. Initially they just tried to replace mainframe application components 1:1 onto VMs in whatever way and whenever anything was <100% reliable they complained that our cloud was not able to do it. I had to explain in a very harsh way, under a lot of pressure (I believe not hitting the deadline of switching off the mainframes meant renewal for a year at 40 Mil.. or thereabouts) the realities of "cloud".

The developers I spoke with in that time though, were very much the opposite of the move fast breaking things crowd. Intelligent, but also narrow minded I would say.