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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: 0.469s | 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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zeeframe ◴[18 Jul 25 13:45 UTC] No.44604586[source]▶
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.

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gosub100 ◴[18 Jul 25 17:28 UTC] No.44607492[source]▶
What is the primary computational task for insurance? Is it computing actuarial tables? Or accounting for the premiums/claims? Or something else? I can excuse banking for not switching off of COBOL but I fail to see how insurance uses it to any significant degree.
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1. jonathanlydall ◴[18 Jul 25 18:14 UTC] No.44608042[source]▶
I can’t remark on COBOL, but I did contracting for a time to non-US insurance company replacing their Universe Basic system originally written in the mid 90s, with a .NET Core (3.1 had just come out at the time, around 2019) based system.

The system contained records of all their policies including all the premium factors (e.g. make, model, year of car, parking location, physical address, etc). These premium factors were then fed into a rating engine which would use actuarial tables with custom actuarial defined algorithms to determine premiums.

In insurance companies, working out the correct premium is core to everything. Insurance companies can have lots of different products and their competitive edge comes from how well they structure their offerings and determine the correct premiums based on risk factors. One does not simply rewrite such a thing.

Couple of things I thought were a bit interesting about the place:

- Their single server running Universe Basic (with a hot spare I believe) had 4TB of RAM. - While I was used to the devs being the stars of the show at the consulting house I worked at, at insurance companies it’s the actuaries.