alt Hacker NewsI am working as a mainframe developer at a bank, currently within a kind of data warehouse solution. Mainly writing in COBOL and Java (in USS), with some scripting in Rexx for internal ISPF tools. A lot of SQL as well, we use DB2 as our main database.
Most of our processes are EOD centric, we run a lot of batch jobs (mainly TSO, very little IMS). Integrations are mostly file based but we do both call and expose APIs (“regular REST APIs”) as well as consuming from and producing to Kafka among other things. We integrate with both mainframe and distributed systems on prem as well as “internal” systems hosted on cloud.
We use Git for source control but have a CI/CD solution that is built in house. Quite a lot of other infrastructure is also built in house.
I am mid 30s and am on the younger side looking at the mainframe area as a whole at my employer, however in my team we have several developers is in their 20/30s.
My background is mainly back- and frontend development on the Microsoft tech stack but I have worked, and do work, with whatever is at hand/required. But mostly stuff like .NET and SQL Server on the backend, and Angular/Vue/React on the front end before this.
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What are wages like? I heard several years ago that you could land a sweet high paying COBOL gig, but from what I've read recently that doesn't seem to be true?
What is crazy is how simpler is working with mainframes that host nation-wide apps, compared to developing a modern web app..
People joke about old coders brought out of their retirement to maintain a dusty COBOL/RPG program, while the reality is that the tooling is simple enough that a young developer could learn them in a month, and master in less than a year.
Plus, the expertise is not lost after a few years, given the platform focus on incremental improvement, and backwards compatibility.