This week I've accidentally bumped into G.D. on a bus. Actually, I woke him up when I got too loud at some point in my chat with P.D. on the way back to work. You know how those quiet introverts totally geek out when they talk about their interests? Like that. :-)
I've quizzed him about his new job at BigBankCorp. They are in the process of rewriting their entire IT infrastructure on IBM MF. They've recently switched from Unisys MF, and this costly move was explained as an opportunity to replace their unmaintainable mess of spaghetti COBOL with... brand spanking new unmaintainable mess of spaghetti COBOL. Apparently they don't like Java because they don't like the OO overhead.
Progress in VM and JIT compiler design over the last decade? Never heard of it.
COBOL workforce are getting old, scarce and expensive? No problem!
Apparently, there's a company that signs up comp.sci. grads with no experience (or friends, apparently), gives them three months of training in MF use / applications programming, and then whores them out to banks for two years for very little pay. The people sign up because it's the only way to get MF experience, if you've missed the opportunity to slave for the government during your military service. Thus, my friend is the second most experienced coder on his team, with two whole years in the air force behind him.
So basically, not only are there new installations of IBM z-series, they actually use the legacy environment (none of that Linux stuff for us!), and develop in COBOL (despite thirty five years of progress in software engineering disciplines, Dijkstra and Wirth be damned), but they ruin perfectly good young people along the way. My heart goes out to every one of those misguided souls!
This is not really sarcasm. I love computers, and I pity the people who get into the industry, in these days, to work on that, instead of on something that is, you know, less than 45 years old.
The node on E2 has lots of info (including Dijkstra's excellent quote), but the best is this piece by John Cowan. *shudder*
No comments:
Post a Comment