Yo if you are doing COBOL systems maintenance for 90k you arent charging enough.
That's all this meme means. Consultants on COBOL maintenance can make 90k in a week. This is not the area where companies pinch pennies.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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A lot of banks have bootcamps where they pick up unemployed people who might not have ever had tech experience in their life. They teach them COBOL and mainframe basics in a few months, and, if they do well, give them a shitty $60k annual job.
Source: know someone who went to one of these bootcamps and now works for a major us bank.
So you're saying you can get free training then just leave for a real paying company eh
I imagine they have some absurd contract that says they can't leave for 89 years or whatever
And I'd like to see that contract hold up in court lol
The trick to exploiting people is keeping them in fear and ignorance.
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My experience with Fintech and the financial sector is that they don't care about how much, they only care about how fast.
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Something that maybe a software engineer union could solve.
Something that a union would definitely solve. What are the banks gonna do? Fire every veteran and hire a team of underpaid newbs to manage their critical systems? If they were dumb enough to do that, let them save themselves millions a year by facing billions in losses... I'm sure that'll work out well.
Banks: Hold my beer!
And later blame it on the workers that unionized.
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If only there was one, I wish I had one just so I wouldn't have to do all the fucking social hoops just to get my resume noticed by an actual human before the HR's "I don't want to do my job!" machines filter me out for not going to an Ivy League School like apparently everyone else did.
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I once applied for a "database admin" job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically "run all our Oracle databases" and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo'ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)
In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said "if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute".
Anyways I didn't get the job, but they're not all underpaid.
Given how much the shareholders are skimming off the top, $2Mil for a critical database engineer is cheap.
Fuck that job I would probably get stomach cancer from all the stress
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That's because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them "yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you". Here in Europe, they'll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you've got a grateful new dev who doesn't know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.
programmers desperately need to unionize
For real. Even just talking to your fellow coding monkeys helps. It's ironic that for example here in France, despite all our workers rights and revolutionary tradition, speaking about your salary is still a social faux-pas. And who benefits? Certainly not us.
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A surprising number of people don't know about levels.fyi
Go to levels.fyi, find some companies and compare at your level. For a long time I was like "ain't no way these numbers are accurate, people are getting paid that much?" YES THE NUMBERS ARE ACCURATE; your company's excuses for a shitty raise this year ("blah blah market conditions, blah blah you are already on the upper end of your band, let's work on a promotion next year") are bullshit.
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Man I'd swim to Europe if some company wants to swoop me up and train me for something that valuable lol here in the States I have to not only pay for the training out the nose, but also find the time to do that while still working my regular job lol
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Not how that format works, mate.
Misusing meme templates is a long programminghumor tradition.
We need strongly typed memes. This place is chaos.
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There is no relationship between what you earn and your skill level. If there were, theoretical physics would be a top paying field. The reason is, this is capitalism and we are horrible negotiators. If you want to earn top money in a technical field, the best you can do is insert yourself in a revenue stream. Roles that are critical to revenue like a billing system or associated with a intrinsically valuable commodity e.g. petrochemical, are more lucrative than other similarly skilled professions.
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Who would've thought a sector with gold flowing through its hands would be so stingy when it comes to updating their backend that they'd end up relying on a dying language, and call upon AI to update it for them rather than just paying a competent team to create and rigorously test a new backend in a modern language
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Honestly not the right format for that meme template lol. The monkey should represent one person doing both looks.
I think some COBOL consultants are very well paid, especially since they are a rare breed.
Friend has a cobol + IBM AIX combo going for him and his on call + at most 1 day/week of work position pays more than my full time very senior dev role.
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what i’m gathering from this thread is that i should learn cobol
From when this has come up in the past, it's a lucrative career path, but probably tricky to break in to since nobody's maintaining a COBOL system they can afford to put into the hands of someone inexperienced.
The dudes earning half a million are able to do so because they've been at it since before their boss was born.
Yeah, and from what I understand, learning the language itself isn't the hard part. It actually has rather few concepts. What's difficult, is learning how to program a computer correctly without all the abstractions and safety measures that modern languages provide.
Even structured programming had to be added to COBOL in a later revision. That's if/else, loops and similar.
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Once you get into it you'll wonder how you ever programmed without "divisions"! I mean honestly, just declaring variables anywhere? Who needs that. Give me a nice, defined data division any day 😌
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Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
The historic high salary for COBOL Devs etc is also partially due to them mostly being old and extremely experienced senior devs
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In Canada, the Ministry of Health pays colleges to teach kids COBOL and JCL. It's a steady job, pension, good bennies. I know a handful of people who went that route, rather than the riskier private sector.
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Cobol is the B-52 of programming languages. Sure there are fancy and expensive new ones or there, but it'll probably outlast them all.
That's a pretty good analogy, but it's Fortran and B-52. Fortran is very good at what it does to this day. Cobol was never good.
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I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.
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