Taken from:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227263/The_Cobol_Brain_Drain
While I don't like to take longer quotes, here is a long quote from the article:
As a former Cobol coder - the language is not all that difficult to learn and master the real importance of Cobol is the embedded business logic - and the clarity of that logic. COBOL was originally an acronym - "Common Business Oriented Language" - and that was its best claim. When you look at a statement: Multiply HOURS-WORKED-IN by RATE-OF-PAY-IN giving GROSS-PAY - you really understand what is going on. Business logic can be convoluted - with mergers / acquisitions / special accounts, and more - the late fee for regular accounts is X, but for preferred accounts, the late fee is Y, but for accounts that we acquired from the XYZ company, the late fee is Z, etc.
The Cobol programmers have a wealth of business knowledge - and that is what is walking out the retirement door.
At Citibank, we kidded that the accounts receivable application would stop if Bob Bivor would retire. Bob was the architect, the person who KNEW the system inside-and-out; the go-to-guy for problems. Yes, the application could be written in Java or C++ or some other programming language, but the business expertise is the important part!!
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227263/The_Cobol_Brain_Drain
While I don't like to take longer quotes, here is a long quote from the article:
Computerworld - David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343 million lines of code -- that run core banking and other operations. But many of the people who built that code base, some of which dates back to Cobol's early days in the 1960s, will be retiring over the next several years.
"We have people we will be losing who have a lot of business knowledge. That scares me," Brown says. He's concerned about finding new Cobol programmers, who are expected to be in short supply in the next five to 10 years. But what really keeps him up at night is the thought that he may not be able to transfer the deep understanding of the business logic embedded within the bank's programs before it walks out the door with employees who retire.
More than 50 years after Cobol came on the scene, the language is alive and well in the world's largest corporations, where it excels at executing large-scale batch and transaction processing operations on mainframes. The language is known for its scalability, performance and mathematical accuracy. But as the boomer generation prepares to check out of the workforce, IT executives are taking a fresh look at their options.
In a recent Computerworld survey of 357 IT professionals, 46% of the respondents said they are already noticing a Cobol programmer shortage, while 50% said the average age of their Cobol staff is 45 or older and 22% said the age is 55 or older.
As a former Cobol coder - the language is not all that difficult to learn and master the real importance of Cobol is the embedded business logic - and the clarity of that logic. COBOL was originally an acronym - "Common Business Oriented Language" - and that was its best claim. When you look at a statement: Multiply HOURS-WORKED-IN by RATE-OF-PAY-IN giving GROSS-PAY - you really understand what is going on. Business logic can be convoluted - with mergers / acquisitions / special accounts, and more - the late fee for regular accounts is X, but for preferred accounts, the late fee is Y, but for accounts that we acquired from the XYZ company, the late fee is Z, etc.
The Cobol programmers have a wealth of business knowledge - and that is what is walking out the retirement door.
At Citibank, we kidded that the accounts receivable application would stop if Bob Bivor would retire. Bob was the architect, the person who KNEW the system inside-and-out; the go-to-guy for problems. Yes, the application could be written in Java or C++ or some other programming language, but the business expertise is the important part!!
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