Do people still use COBOL ??? 11

[gazolba]

Are places still using COBOL? I'm an ex-COBOL programmer with about 20 years experience in various dialects of COBOL (I also coded in PL/1). But I have not seen a job advertised requiring COBOL in at least 10 years - except the odd AS400 shop that uses COBOL instead of RPG. Who do you guys work for? I often wonder what happened to the billions of lines of COBOL code that were written in the 70's and 80's, surely it can't all have been outsourced to India.

 

[etom]

Many of the legacy systems are still written in Cobol. We now are just adding new GUI (Windows) interfaces to these applications however, the Business code running on the Mainframe is still Cobol, PLI, Assembler, etc. The reason you do not see many job reqs for Cobol is there is still a lot of us old timmers still around. Most companys have been able to hire from within to keep those positions filled.

Additionally, most of the changes now are in the GUI interfaces. The Edits, Data input and presentation. The business code may still be Cobol however, the changes do not require as many people since all the edits, data input and presentation is being done in different languages.

Cobol has not gone away (and probably will not), it is just hidden in the back hallways of the new world. With the advancement of some compilers to support object oriented Cobol, we may see more interest in Cobol positions in the future.

etom.

 

[MarcLodge]

What country are you in Gaz?

 

[gazolba]

I'm in the USA but originally from Britain.
I live in Phoenix, Arizona where all the major corporations have outsourced to India and other countries. I could not find a job there so I'm now working in Dallas, Texas. I spent most of my time here (20+ years) in New York, but its too expensive to live there. I now do mostly PC client-server and web development. I have not touched a line of COBOL or PL/1 in a decade, not because I did not want to, but because there appears to be zero demand.

 

[Dimandja]

gazolba,

Go to

http://www.dice.com,

type "COBOL" as keyword, and choose COBOL jobs from the hundreds (thousands?) listed. Since programming for the web, you don't seem to be going out much.

Dimandja

 

[gazolba]

Well I'm only interested in jobs in Phoenix. I've had Monster.com and other sites emailing me job listings for 18 months and I think I've only seen two mention COBOL. I was laid off from my job in Phoenix along with about 120 other people - about 50 of them COBOL programmers - all the work went to India. That was over 12 months ago, and to my knowledge, none of those people have found a job in IT yet. In case you don't know, Phoenix is a city of about 1.5 million people.

 

[webrabbit]

I tried the link and got over 800 COBOL hits. Then I tried COBOL + California and got 7. I applied for two of them. Catch a star, Dimandja.

I just tried COBOL + Phoenix and got 7 hits!

 

[jplubell3619]

Thanks for the Link -- Ive been looking for COBOL work for some time now. Its the first place I've seen in months that
had some actual COBOL jobs advertised. Found 12 in the
Phill'ey area that I'm relocating to this weekend.

 

[Crox]

I thought that this thread was much richer in the beginning, also about outsourcing..... What has happened?