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NetworkWorld - C and COBOL developers are doomed....

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by kehill50 1 view

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SO THEY say.....

Hello All:

I just came across this article from NetworkWorld. It was written on 17 April 2008 and details the five(5) IT skills which will not boost your salary. Link: http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2008/041708-careers-sidebar.html&pagename=/news/2008/041708-careers-sidebar.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041708-careers-sidebar.html&site

Here is the statment in question:

"...Skills in programming languages such as Cobol, Fortran, PowerBuilder and more don?t rate like they once did.

"Certainly the Cobol people that had a resurgence with the Y2K bug aren?t in demand," says John Estes, vice president of strategic alliances of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing consultancy. "Certain other applications such as Delphi and PowerBuilder, [which were] very big in the '90s, are no longer in demand."

IT work-force and compensation research conducted by Foote Partners revealed that Cobol, PowerBuilder and Jini noncertified skills were among the lowest-paying skills in the second half of 2007. David Foote, CEO and chief research officer at Foote Partners, says the research shows not that such skills aren?t in use today but that companies aren?t willing to pay for them. "There is still a lot of C and Cobol around, though these skills are worth very little paywise," Foote says...."

At this point, I would like to quote Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley from Aliens - "...Did IQ's suddenly drop while I was away...?"

With that being said, and being a C Application Developer, what does the rest of the community think?

16 replies

by tony hopkinson

as well, and they are right about that one.

Cobol, well rumours of my demise are exagerated or what. Even if it were true, someone who knows cobol and something else is going to be able to find work for a good while.

I've been going through the Delphi to C# (very easy in my opinion) switch and there are more than a few opportunities in the UK for that.

C++, Java, C#, Perl.... all C based, so erm hello...

It's these HR, Gartner thimble brains up and at 'em again as far as I can see.
These are the people who think you become skilless when someone releases a new IDE.

How many jobs are there that do just C, or even funnier just HTML.

If nearly fell off my chair when I read HTML was dying because it was being taken over by AJAX. Why don't they get someone who knows their arse from their elbow to do these things.

by dr dij

is now working for networkworld?

he's the one who predicted the demise of IT, etc.

by kehill50

That these "experts" think that C-Developers and Cobol developers skills are "...worth very little paywise...."

And they have been in development for how long...?????

by jaqui

that we need to put lots of chlorine in the gene pool.

not in demand they say?
guess they will have to eat their words, when all those who know the languages [ well except for delphi ] mentioned decide that they won't work for peanuts any more and the businesses all of a sudden can't afford not to pay more, to save the even higher cost of porting their core software to another language.

by tony hopkinson

When Bill poached Anders and co from Borland , he proved he wasn't hiding behind the door when business acumen was being handed out again.

I've been doing since 96, there are still jobs about, but anyone who doesn't put want delphi and (java or .net) on the ad isn't worth working for.

I got one hit from a place where they said they had another fours years of delphi work planned. In this day and age of certs and versions, career suicide and they were trying sell it as a plus point!

by jaqui

they made delphi a .net framework language, they ruined any possible use.

sorry, but a "requirement" for a development tool has to be available 100% cross platform, or it is useless. Forcing vendor lock-in is bad for the clients, since it remove choices.

the delphi language itself is useful, and would be more useful if it was not locked into one platform.

by tony hopkinson

I got a choice in 95/96 Delphi or VB 4?5?

I was pascal trained and Delphi compiled to a standalone executable, didn't need that vbrun.dll crap. A shed load of other advantages as well.

In windows world it couldn't be touched until MS came out with VS for .Net and those f***wit sheep at Borland tried to play catch up.

Delphi was an IDE, object Pascal and a big pile of windows components. I never really worried about the cross platform bit as without the windows controls it wasn't a shed load of use to me, and I've always been wary of cross platform claims. You end up with platform specific compilers, platform specific interpreters or something so lacking in high level features you might as well have done it in machine code.

I'd rather have something that does what I need well, than do three things , two of which I don't need badly.

by jaqui

kylix came with both c++ builder and Delphi ides, and the borland compiler.
fairly useful set of tools.

now, the one tool meant to work ccross platform that seems worth the effort is code bocks.
a wxwidgets based ide, for building wxwidgets apps.
with Windows, Linux and OSX support currently.
http://www.codeblocks.org/

being plugin based it isn't difficult to get the exact functionality required, and being open source the improvements may be drastic in a short time.

The limitations of it, C++ only.
wxwidgets does have a python base, but I haven't seen it supported in code blocks yet.

nice though, they have it set to allow you to use most available compilers.
http://www.codeblocks.org/features

Since WxWidgets is designed to handle the system specific code for you, and Code::Blocks is written with WxWidgets, these tools sets may be the real answer for cross platform issues.

by tony hopkinson

no need for cross platform code, company has invested in .net big style, and C++, well I could muddle through, the newer cookie cutting .net and Java types,. they are going to have problems.

Accomplished developers can screw up C++, ones new to it especially if they are not used to explicit resource management can really mess things up.

by deepsand

Clearly the answer is no.

Given that, how can we trust their assessments re. any other language?

by jaqui

I hadn't heard about a perl wrapper for it.
wxperl.sourceforge.net

or, grab it from cpan.
[ it must be stable and well documented to be included in cpan ;) ]

a quick perusal of the "hello world" tutorial for wxperl doesn't include any explicit resource handling.
ahh, wxwidgets uses resource tables and handles the resource allocation for you.
[ which, considering resources are handled differently by different platforms and widgets sets kind of makes sense. ]

wx.NET anyone?
[ yup, .NET wrapper for wxwidgets ]

by ron

Out-of-date? Yes, of course! On the contrary companies are willing to spend money on conversion projects to a up-to-date language/environment. These projects have to deal with discovering the business-rules out of the legacy-applications and a Cobol-expert/analist is most of the time able to do these things. The benefit-targets of the project (e.i. support, license-costs reduction...) will be an indication of the pay-rate of the expert. Most of the times they will love you.

by ed woychowsky

I've been doomed before and I'm actually starting to like it! Nothing helps with learning new skills like sheer panic. :)

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