I hear so much about the shortage of programmers to fix y2k software, espceially cobol programmers; several local colleges are now offering intro classes in cobol. Does anyone know if there is a market for a neophite cobol programmer? What about income expectations? Is it wouth the effort? I have several programmer-friends working on the y2k problem., and they are delighted with their employment/income expectations. Anyone else looking into this?

-- Dan McManus (DCMAnus@aol.com), May 04, 1998

Answers

Dan

I started my IT career in 1965, working for Canadian Pacific in Montreal, where they trained us for 6 months in COBOL. It was the beginning of the information age in business, and we were given an aptitude test first to make sure CP's investment wasn't going to be wasted. We weren't very useful for those 6 months, because that's about how long it takes to really get a feel for programming.

By the spring of 1999 anybody who can even SPELL the word COBOL will be able to get big money. If you have good skills in mathematics and logic and like problem-solving, do it. Sure it's a risk, but, like learning a language, the first thousand hours are the hardest. Good luck.

Steve Francis

-- steve francis (sfrancis@sympatico.ca), May 05, 1998.

Steve,

Why would the demand for COBOL programmers be much higher by the spring of 99 than it is now?

I would have thought it would be too late to start remediation by the spring of 99 at least for the mainframe crowd.

I haven't noticed any desperate recruiting measures of college graduates to work on y2k problems.

-- Dave McGinnis (solaris2010@hotmail.com), May 28, 1998.