Let's cut to the chase Jow Forums
Fuck what language is best, what language makes you the most money?
I know KDB+/Q is lucrative if you're in London/NYC/HK, but basically unknown outside finance
COBOL is another one, I'm unironically thinking of learning it and consulting or something, everyone doing it is fucking ancient but banks can't afford to ditch it
Any others?
French fag here, I was offered a COBOL job twice recently.
Salary: 24 000€ (brut)
In fucking Paris
I asked if they were jocking, they were not. 24000€ brut in one of the most expensive and shitty city in the world to code in fucking COBOL. The second time I laughed, left the HR office, slamed the door and kept laughing very hard until I was out of the building while making fun at each of their slave. Everyone though I was some kind of crazy man wearing a tie and a suit. No way I'm writing COBULLSHIT for a penny.
I'm doing something similar. Me and a couple of friends are learning COBOL and ABF, and we're thinking of starting our own company to move those ancient systems into more modern architectures using modern languages.
European salaries for tech are dogshit anyway though
COBOL is only lucrative is you're programming on old Z mainframe. That's cool, but I would worry about longevity since those mainframes will eventually be replaced by Hadoop clusters.
Java if you're looking for a cash-grab. But beware, the Pajeet meme is true.
Try it, hope it works out
Though the non-technical boomers in charge of making those decisions will probably hire IBM to do it for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
So best bet might be to get acquired by a big company and charge outrageous rates for your services
true.
Isn't it best (to earn the most money) to keep up with the most hip and new programming languages and framewroks, like learning the new JS framework and getting aws certs? I don't think they pay a lot to maintain niche legacy code.
>will probably hire IBM to do it for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
We strongly suspect this will happen to. But nothing ventured nothing gained I guess.
i'll never understand how employers are so stuck up their ass
no wonder highly skilled people try to get a job in the US instead if you are capped around 30K-40K your whole life
Yeah for sure, only way to know is go for it and see what happens, there's definitely money to be made there
I make that much as webdev here in Chile. Are things REALLY that fucked up in Europe?
It's old code and they don't want to pay more.
This is the problem with learning COBOL. In theory it looks like you will be able to command high salary, but in reality it doesn't work out.
24000€ Brut (~1650€/month net) is the normal starting salaries for code monkey outside of Paris if they have a bachelor degree or less. Master degrees get paid a bit more for the exact same job. France is fucked like most latin countries in Europe. An awesome dev' with a shitty degree doing the work of 3 people will get paid less than a shitter doing the same job with a master degree.
That's fucked
You could always get a programming job in SocGen and go somewhere like HK but you'l get treated like shit in banks
Yeah it sucks, I regret studying CS, I should have with Math.
>COBOL
Why don't they just use node.js or react? baka
Tbqh CS will probably take you as far as anywhere
I did a languages undergrad and a business masters. Them I realised I hated people and loved programming.
Funny how life works out
>react
>nodejs
He's a frenchtard. He's healthcare and only works for 15h per week. These french basterds have no work ethics at all
yeah a good idea for 2019 and beyond is to learn Java and C++, and JavaScript, and then a few meme frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and also some backend stuff like Node.JS, Express, MongoDB, SQL. That will cover you for like 90% of jobs right now
even in Canada the wages are third world tier. I'm moving to the USA at the first chance I get
Why do they pay programmers so well in the united states?
>transaction processing system to be replaced with batch processing system
user, this is like saying chainsaws will replace steak knives
They aren't that bad desu,
user I graduated this year and I'm making around 80k in Ottawa which is a pretty comfy salary (Granted I'm not a shit developer and I think I'm above average compared to other new grads (also went to a meme university (not Waterloo or UofT or UBC or McGill lol))
I want to know too.
python
>implying they'd hire Cobol programmers without 3+ years of proven industry experience programming in Cobol
The absolute madmen in charge of things decided to redo Finland's entire health care IT infrastructure in obscure programming language called MUMPS that not a single universitty or even consulting firm in whole country teaches.
MUMPS was made for healthcare administration software, it is old though
MUMPS is not exactly obscure in healthcare shit, considering it used to be standard, but yeah, this is stupid
It's a little like rewriting all your physics code in FORTRAN
Just let it die. Banks would be forced to rewrite all that pile of bullshit using better tech.
It's cheaper to overhaul your 70 year old COBOL mainframes and replace them with a goddamn raspi running a python script than it is to keep paying people to maintain your godawful stone age software from now until eternity.
Also there's an insane amount of ageism in maintaining ancient systems like this.
Nobody will trust anyone under 45 who claims to know cobol to touch their business logic because any fuckups means weeks or even months of downtime and it could bankrupt them.
Me too, I'm studying computer science right now, and I don't get it.
It seems like it would be the easiest job in the world to outsource, so I would think I would have to compete with everyone around the globe.
I don't get this. It sounds like old programmers are just artificially making themselves scarce. If they're using some test-driven development that should ensure the code will remain stable.
I have the feeling it's a clusterfuck of monolithic spaghetti code if they're so terrified of letting younger folks work on the code.
COBOL isn't "niche legacy code."
Think of every major financial institution. Think of every major government organization. Think of the Fortune 500 companies that were early in their adoption of computer systems for critical tasks.
Every single one of them is powered by COBOL.
>It's cheaper to overhaul your 70 year old COBOL mainframes
In the long run, probably. In the short term: definitely not.
The companies still running (and writing) COBOL are the ones that have it running critical infrastructure. Think money transfers at a bank.
Their logic here is: we've had this system running for 50 years. It works perfectly. If we migrate, shit could break and cost us millions.
It's worth it to them to keep paying senior COBOL developers $250k a year than it is to hire a similar senior Java developer for $200k all the while introducing the potential for downtime.
try to imagine a monolithic black box that was implemented decades ago, everyone involved with it's implementation is long dead, there's little to no surviving documentation, and all you know is that this company absolutely cannot let it stop working or else you'll take out the automated clearing house software for one bank which other companies have daisy chained their operations to, and this singular point of failure would stop automated bank transfers and check payments for over 30 million people.
>I have the feeling it's a clusterfuck of monolithic spaghetti code
Have you ever seen even a moderately large COBOL program?
That's all there is.
/thread, fuck OP