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.
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
And people wonder why companies dont train undergrads anymore
Oh, no, educated workers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe companies should value their employees if you want company loyalty.
Oh no, job providers who don’t want to be taken advantage of and know their worth, maybe people should value their job providers if you want their loyalty.
spoiler
My time on Lemmy (and Reddit before) ironically make me appreciate communism less and less
There are some court cases going on right now about this type of thing. Generally, the payback is only allowed to be for the real cost of training, and only for a few years. So that 60k salary for 3 years is also the right amount to make you worth 150k anywhere else.
This has been going on for decades. My dad became a COBOL programmer in 1980ish after taking an aptitude test in answer to a newspaper ad. Y2K consulting was a pretty good gig.
My experience with Fintech and the financial sector is that they don’t care about how much, they only care about how fast.
They just have understanding of correct criteria of financial success, since they, eh, work with finances.
Something that maybe a software engineer union could solve.
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.
The thing is, this type of job never needed a union previously. It was niche enough for a long time, that you were sought out and rewarded well. But yes, I think we’re moving into an era where we do need union representation.
Oddly enough, with my experience I am sought out still. Just for bizarre startups who clearly never checked my previous work history. Some of the messages I get on Linkedin for example are just weird requests.
Nah, they’re going to “solve” it by paying web developers less, not paying cobol developers more
Yes, workers unions are famous for fighting to lower the wages of the workers they represent. Very much. Indeed.
I think the problem is that unions are famous for fighting for equal pay across the board for the workers they represent regardless of individual competency or market demand. For this example they’ll give COBOL developers a raise to 120K and give web developers a pay cut to 120K.
Or best case scenario they give the COBOL developers a short-term raise to 150, then raises across the industry stagnate in coming years to offset the fact that employers feel like they’re overpaying for some people. But sure, a few years later the union can come in to look like a hero arguing for a fraction of the raise the web devs could have already gotten.
Cobol devs that we had (while we spent insane money to retire their systems) we’re getting 300-500k/year.
I’m sure companies are trying to rip off any young new entrants but 90k seems super low.
Yep I know a COBOL programmer and she drives a nice-ass Mercedes SUV and owns 2 houses. Making way more than I do.
Better learn COBOL now.
Right, you can make that kind of money when you have 40 years of Cobol behind you. But even for new entrants, $90k seems low. There had better be a premium for dealing with old bullshit, especially when you’re probably damaging your resume in the long run.
90k sounds pretty standard for inexperienced (although maybe not first job) devs in general for most markets. Throw in factors like experience or skills in low supply and that changes pretty fast.
I know that COBOL isn’t going away anytime soon, but most companies have seen the writing on the wall for a long time. Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underway. Some places even have a surplus of COBOL devs because of it. But there are countless places where it can’t be replaced, at least not reasonably.
The only way a COBOL dev is making $90k after 5 years is if there are very specific fringe benefits that make them not want to move along, or they are extremely naive about the market.
Anywhere that COBOL can be replaced with something more modern, it’s already underw
Rewrites are extremely risky though, and some companies don’t want to risk it. That COBOL code probably has 40 years worth of bug fixes and patches for every possible edge/corner case. A rewrite essentially restarts everything from scratch.
Do you know of a decent sized company that successfully migrated away from COBOL? I’d be interested in reading a whitepaper about how they did it, if such a thing exists.
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.
I’d understanding actively pressuring someone to share their salary being a faux-pas. Admittedly, just sharing your own may make some people feel pressured to share theirs out of reciprocity, but just sharing your own salary generates nowhere near the same amount of pressure as outright telling someone “share your salary or you’re a bad person on the side of The Man!”
I hope the amount of people sharing their salary increases and talking about it becomes normalized.
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.
Sadly this doesn’t include my profession (Industrial Automation). Do you know of other alternatives?
You could try Glassdoor, but my understanding is that it’s not as accurate as levels.
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
Well, you could do like many US people and visit Ireland, I suppose :)
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
It really wouldn’t be all that bad. If they’re dropping $2m/y on a database admin, then their BCDR plan must be rock solid with crazy fault tolerances. I’d imagine outages are extremely rare.
But, if they’re dropping that kind of money, you’d have to be an expert in the field. Or know someone.
$2m is enough to pay for chemotherapy
Flipping burgers is enough to pay for chemotherapy. Src: am european
Yeah I had convinced myself that I would only do it for a year and be able to retire much much sooner.
If you labor there’s only two ways you get paid your full worth: you own the means of your production or your boss is a chump. However much the job pays, you are going to have a larger impact than your salary (hopefully).
Not how that format works, mate.
Misusing meme templates is a long programminghumor tradition.
We need strongly typed memes. This place is chaos.
Possibly better suited for Vanya and Five Drive By Each Other
Works for me.
I think the text should be combined into one sentence, which would be run-on but still give the impression that both images refer to one person, as it should be.
Ah, I understand now
Another meme purist. If you guys keep this up you’re going to spawn a new variety of meme.
If it’s constructive then it should be interpreted as good faith.
Is saying “you’re doing it wrong” really constructive?
The first step to correction is understanding there is a problem in the first place. This is quite constructive, it may just not feel like it is because it’s framed combatively.
You’re doing it wrong is the phrase that lets teachers teach at one of the most basic levels.
The public is essentially a self teaching teacher, so this is just the process of public correction happening. It may look/feel like public shaming, and it may be if they’re going too far, but that is the mechanism that I think is playing out here.
Does that framing make it any more palatable to you or does it still seem unnecessarily disrespectful?
It’s probably just a definition thing.
To me, constructive criticism means that the criticism doesn’t just point out failure, but that it then also shows how to correct that failure.
By itself, “you’re doing it wrong” is just destructive: it takes something apart, it destroys it. Without a subsequent “and here’s how you would do it right,” it doesn’t become constructive, it doesn’t help in putting things back together in the correct way.
Sure, as a first step, “you’re doing it wrong” is completely justified when something is actually wrong.
But without the second step - the constructive part - it just doesn’t constitute constructive criticism. By itself, it’s just criticism.
Ah I get that, like the frustration of a sociological paper pointing out a societal issue but offering no steps on how to solve it due to fixes being out of scope (utterly infuriating lol).
I still think the criticism is valid, but I do think I agree in that the criticism could be more constructive… But I still think laying the foundation of the argument, so to speak, is still constructive even though it may not go as far as one may need for it to cross the threshold back into polite…
I am still convinced this is a knee jerk feeling issue more than anything truly being amiss, but I have been wrong before. What do you think?
I agree it probably is a definitions thing, I’m very pedantic sometimes and it feels like my definition of constructive is much more optimistic/wider/encompassing than yours. That doesn’t mean that my definition is right or that your position is wrong though, that’s just what I think is going on here.
I didn’t think a step by step guide was really needed to correct it, but maybe I should?
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
One problem is that they need to put a price tag and therefore a timeline on such a project. Due to the complexity and the many unknown unknowns in theses decades worth of accumulated technical debts, no one can properly estimate that. And so these projects never get off and typically die during planning/evaluation when both numbers (cost and time) climb higher and higher the longer people think about it.
IMO a solution would be to do it iteratively with a small team and just finish whenever. Upside: you have people who know the system inside-out at hand all the time should something come up. Downside of course is that you have effectively no meaningful reporting on when this thing is finished.
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.
Hmm I have the AIX half of that. Maybe learning COBOL is worth the pain…
I know a person who does AIX consulting with Cobol. She works about 4-8 weeks a year spread between 3 companies and makes enough to raise a family and fund a massive hobby farm. Helps to be in an area with a large fintech presence I imagine.
Very nice, yeah that’s the problem. I broke into AIX in the wholesale industry in early 2000’s so I have very few finance connections, which is where it all seems to be.
I have also been work from home for 7 years now and figured I’d have to go onsite for banks. That may have changed post covid. I will poke around and see what might be out there for me
Idk what the AIX job market is right now, but several years ago banks in central Europe poached employees back and forth just to reach minimum staff required.
The OGs are. The new trainees ain’t.
Which makes sense, but they are still being seriously taken advantage of.
Can I get a job at wherever you’re working? Im earning 60k $ a year
$60K doing what and where?
C++ Cad application, Norway, so not from a poor country. I know I’m underpaid but didn’t expect it to be that bad
Hang in there, friend! You’ll make it big sooner rather than later!
How many years experience? It took me a few years before I started making a decent wage.
Definitely keep honing your skills and applying around for different jobs, and taking jobs that you can use to “leapfrog” to other, even better jobs.
6 years. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m not newbie either
Okay that is getting up in years. I was about there when I started to get more aggressive with the salary I was asking. You could probably start on the
developer I -> developer II -> senior developercareer path.Do you look at other jobs much? Do much networking? Talk to other devs about their salary? Even just grabbing a lunch with some workmates from time to time can help get you in the right mindset of recognising your worth.
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.
Grace Fucking Hopper
So move fast and break things, 60s edition.
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.
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.
I’d be happy if I could land a web dev role for 40k at this point
That’s crazy. If you have the skills don’t under value yourself. Don’t be afraid to walk away from an offer. Never tell a potential employer your current salary and never give them a number if they ask in interviews. Ask what their range is as a response and if that matches your number, proceed. Then negotiate for the max of their range. If you get to that point, they already want you, so you have the upper hand in negotiation.
I think the mention of fintech in the text makes an implication of online store of some sort, where I could see it being profitable because it’s a lot more work to be able to generate listings and accept payment and shipping information.
It means banking. Finance tech.
That was never in question. Online payment portals are Fintech. You don’t have to work at IBM to be in Fintech, it includes the entire process built on top of their platform as well.
But COBOL is famously used in legacy banking systems, not modern internet payment systems.
I’m saying that the mention of Fintech in the First Case would IMPLY that the WebDev also deals with Fintech. If both devs have comparable skillsets then it makes sense to compare their pay rates.
IDK, maybe I’m reaching with this one.
