I'm actually getting a chance to move out of the Dark Ages (aka COBOL) [View all]

Starting a new gig on the 16th. Still with the state, same money (wife yelled at me for not negotiating harder for at least some sort of pay bump), different agency, less stress, and a better, brighter future. I will also get to switch from 50 hours a week to the 40 hours a week I'm supposed to work. <sarcasm>Y'all know us fucking lazy union state workers.</sarcasm>

The big win is that I will eventually be COBOL FREE!

I worked on contract at this new place about 10-12 years ago. They were still running Mainframe COBOL and in the early stages of exploring the .NET and SQL Server world. Wanted to get on with them since this seemed like an ideal opportunity, but there was a bloodletting in progress back then. Temporary state workers were fleeing, so I knew once my contract was up, we were gone.

Around 2003 or 2004, they moved to Fujitsu COBOL.NET--the solution to ensure COBOL would never die. I hear mixed stories about how well the conversion went, but apparently some couldn't make the move into .NET, even with the COBOL syntax.

When they went .NET, the database moved to SQL Server, the front end became VB.NET, and there was a database layer (I believe also in VB.NET) between the COBOL.NET and SQL Server. Core business logic remains in COBOL.

Today, they have a small team of Cobologists, which I will join. Even with me, this group is at least half the size of what it was back in 2001. I am not only going back to the same agency but the same group where I worked before. I half expect to find my name in comments. That Karma and her sister Fate, they are some piece of work.

During the interview they made it clear this is a COBOL gig. However, there has been an effort to migrate the COBOL.NET components to C#. Problem is the Cobolosaurs don't know C#, and the .NET developers don't know COBOL. It has been more than a somewhat disjointed effort to migrate.

Enter me. They want a developer who is infected with the COBOL virus, but who is willing to learn and move into the .NET realm of C#--their chosen migration path. OOOH! OOOH! PICK ME! PICK ME! They did.

Initially, it will be all COBOL. Since the Washington State Legislature is in session, some project through August, it's probably going to be a lot of rapid deliveries of work NOW. That's fine. I can do COBOL in my sleep. You get used to the nightmares.

I've done some classroom in VB, Studio, C#, and ASP. Very little actual production coding in it. Took a C# class in 2011, while I was laid off, and it was my first time seeing .NET so I took the Level 1 class. Blasted through with ease and twiddled my thumbs a lot. Studio environment hadn't changed much. If I hadn't gotten my current COBOL gig in 2011, I would have kept at the C# classes, we probably woulda sold off most everything, lived in our minivan with the kids, and I would have tried to talk my way in the door doing entry level C# somewhere.

New place asked about training, and I said while I could step into it right away and figure things out, I really did want to get any and all training I could get on Studio and C#. No point in handicapping myself if I can avoid it. They have also moved from Waterfall to Agile recently, so I asked about training there as well.

During the first interview, when I got to ask questions, I asked about the conversion from Mainframe COBOL to COBOL.NET and whether they did any major refactoring of the code. Nope, not really. I restrained myself, but it tickled me and makes me giggle now when I think about it.

When I started there in 2000, I had been doing Mainframe COBOL already for 10 years. COBOL is COBOL, but there was something about the style of this COBOL that made me a bit puzzled. This led me to ask a question of my coworker, a retired state worker then contracting, whom we'll call George. I said to George that there's just something about the style of this COBOL code that I've never seen before, and asked if he could explain it. George took a deep breath, sighed, and pushed his glasses back up onto his nose. He's been asked this before, and there's a story behind it. COOL!

Back in the early 1970s, the agency migrated from Assembly language to COBOL and switched hardware platforms. At that time, and George was there for it, the decision was to just do code conversion and worry about refactoring the code later. Fast forward to 2000, it's later, but refactoring never happened.

1950s or 1960s era Assembly language morphs into Mainframe COBOL then morphs into COBOL.NET and at least some of the original business logic still lives today in 2013--whether they want it to or not.

Talk of COBOL being dead isn't really appropriate. It's like talking about the planet running out of oil. We don't have to run out of oil for the shit to hit the fan. There doesn't have to be zero lines of COBOL code in production before one realizes the future of COBOL developers is bleak. At 62, yeah one can retire doing COBOL. At 45 (me), not so much. I suspect there's Ada, FORTRAN, and PL-1 in production, but I wouldn't encourage one to pursue a career in it.