Ah yes. 25 year-olds. The age group Elon Musk thinks he belongs to. I had an uncle (now deceased) whose social group consisted of people 20 years his junior. Kinda weird.
And these fools probably think they can replace it with something else modern, even though these stupid ancient cobol programs are also stupidly efficient at their job.
I worked in a big insurance company for a while. All the source systems for customer data were IBM mainframes. Can’t count the number of times senior management asked us to migrate to “something modern”, or the times we had to explain that doing that was outside the company’s tolerance for risk.
Honestly, one thing that might bite the departments they're trying to rob in the ass here is how competently put together their software infrastructure is. I imagine most of the insane COBOL engineering that actually holds everything together has been abstracted away.
Anyway, they should just ask their boss, who, when asked what his favorite programming languages were, said, “C++…but sometimes I like to do a little bit in assembly.”
He's like Andreesen where they were coders thirty years ago but haven't had real jobs other than being rich managers and investors in long enough that there's no way those skills still exist.
oh yeah Andreesen was The Real Deal in like 1995 when Musk was getting a few credits on video games and being generally useless at startups before he moved on to being professionally rich
If Musk said he likes assembly what he means is "I once opened a SNES ROM in a hex editor to see if I could change a high score" and leaving out that 1. He gave up and 2. That's not how you'd change a score.
LOL, easy! It's happened before. In 1998 a whole bunch of my peers at age 21 did exactly that. They left University, got hired as COBOL programmers (having only coded C/C++) and we're tasked with hunting huge code bases for two digit dates.
Seething that DEI military hire and woke Vassar "educated" Admiral Grace Hopper made a language too hormonal and female for his logical male 175 IQ brain to understand.
It's usually the tech websites that are reporting what's going on. Mainstream newspapers are confused about what's really happening, because computers are involved:
Read-only vs admin privileges
Mainframe
Assumption that any young man (but not woman) who can use a computer is a "computer wiz"
I worked on a project decades ago to move financial systems from mainframe to Unix. There was that one guy who thought, instead of building from scratch, we should recompile the COBOL code on Unix and write a JES2 JCL emulator. Boy, did we laugh at him behind his back.
I didn't even think about that. I did just read that one of them (Bobba) is amazing because he rewrote a project after a teammate deleted it. These guys are so inexperienced their code wasn't even in git or some cvs in college. That's blowing my mind.
now busy laughing, imagining how fascist kiddo faces the system z hardware management console for the first time "there is a thinkpad here with a surprisingly large and heavy docking station that runs... everything?!"
when I was a kid, facing IBM System/36 software ported to OS/2, I was completely flabbergasted. But I had my dad, who basically is a living IBM history book. Let's hope no one explains shit to the nazi-kids.
Plus learning mainframe stuff the hard way: Hey, what's RPG? ... Why is the whitespace all messed up? ... I just had VS code reformat the file and now nothing works?!?!?!
They must be used to it. Probably every time they have someone new in charge, they start with an attempt to migrate away from the z. Can't be that complicated...
Their mainframe product management is a work of art. Sure, mainframe ops is expensive, but you know what's even more expensive? Migrating away from it. As long as they keep that balance intact, it'll be raining money for all eternity.
I have been involved in a european private sector project where they have software rolling since 1968. They had at least one developer who was working on the project in the third generation. Maintaining code his dad and gramps contributed to. But sure, migration is just one hackathon weekend away ;)
Comments
if you're unlucky, some ancient program called "The Librarian" that hasn't been updated in 20 years. i shit you not
To which I say, sure, dude. Sure.
But they can both get into the sea.
Read-only vs admin privileges
Mainframe
Assumption that any young man (but not woman) who can use a computer is a "computer wiz"
Hold my beer.