• brsrklf
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    9 months ago
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    9 months ago
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    It’s been a while since I was told this, so not sure how true it still is, but there a was a niche but lucrative market for people who could maintain stuff in Fortran, COBOL and the like.

    Because there were some critical antediluvian pieces of software in banking, big businesses, etc that some companies were terrified of having to replace one day.

    I’d expect that by now most would have migrated to more common languages, but I don’t really know.

    • yggdar
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      9 months ago
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      I’m in IT in the financial industry. There is indeed still a ton of COBOL around.

      • brsrklf
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        9 months ago
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        I guess some things never change, quite literally.

        I’ve only worked for a bank for a few months, and it was on a new service project, so no idea what made the old finance workflows tick. For all I know it was the same there.

    • noerdmanOP
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      9 months ago
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      I heard that story, too When I started studying. That was almost 20 years ago. I’d have assumed they had moved on until now if that hadn’t been an urban myth in the first place.

      • f314
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        9 months ago
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        I work at an insurance company, and our core business system is written in RPG. We are starting the process of splitting it up and modernizing it, but I suspect there will still be some RPG code running in production in ten years.