• toofpic@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    We’re maintaining and developing OpenVMS OS, and both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders.
    Many large companies maintain their old systems and use them for production or data processing purposes. Sometimes it’s too expensive to migrate off, but im many cases “it just works”

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        9 months ago

        I work primarily in a Long Tail language (languages don’t die, but they have a long tail where usage slowly creeps away). I tell the business that we could ultimately solve all the problems with the platform except for one: finding new programmers to hire for it. That’s what will ultimately force us to migrate. Doesn’t have anything to do with cost or ability to take on new features or handle new ways of doing things.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          9 months ago

          I’ve worked in that area. It was broken back in the 90s and I doubt the crusty old parts of the system have gotten any better. I was tasked with writing a more modern wrapper for part of the legacy system, and when I asked for documentation I was told they had literally nothing to give me.

          I was just an intern at the time so maybe someone with more clout could have gotten sometime to dig in a forgotten closet for old technical docs, but it still strikes me as a very bad sign when technical docs for a system every agent uses all day every day aren’t immediately available on the company’s intranet.

      • toofpic@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I know for sure several airports are using OpenVMS, and there are more we don’t know about, as some companies keep running yheir stuff for decades not asking anyone for support.
        And I’m sure There are multiple other old systems out there, it’s too hard to replace them.
        And they work! Our VMS stuff runs great, it’s fast, and the uptime is measured in decades sometimes. So the problem is hardware: we rolled out the first production x86 version this year, so our users are fine (it’s still an issue of porting your software, but it’s not as terrible as building everything from scratch), but before that OpenVMS could run on Itanium servers at latest, and the platform was dying off since the beginning of 2000s, so it is a problem to find a normal replacement machine now.

    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      And in many cases if it gets replaced it’s for a system that looks fancier but actually has more problems than the original… See Phoenix for the Canadian government employees pay.

      • waitmarks@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If you actually do have decades of fortran experience, work for NOAA. Their weather models are mostly fortran and they need engineers. Specifically the NOAA EPIC contract that i worked on previously definitely needs people knowledgeable in fortran and was 100% work from home. Feel free to DM me if you want more details.

    • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I’ve seen those postings and some executive is living in dreamland thinking they can hire someone to do that for $25/hr.

      • AFaithfulNihilist@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        My bosses tried to ask me if I knew anyone the could hire for a full time position at a hospital. I ask for more details and eventually they relent because they aren’t having any luck on indeed/craigslist/temp recruiter.

        It’s a 24 hour on call position for ‘up to’ $55,000 to be the sole IT staff for a 100 bed hospital in upstate NY.

        I literally laughed at them, but they seem to insist they are gonna find someone to take the job.

        I actually think the job isn’t even legal as described.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Hahahaha, what a joke.

          Sorry, not interested in 24hr on call until they start talking $100k+. That’s asking a lot of someone.

          Sounds like they need multiple staff, actually. You can’t do on-call without having a rotation. What happens if Bob gets hit by a bus? This tells me all I need to know about them. Typical SMB “leadership”, they lack any concept of managing systems - be it IT, finance, mechanical, whatever. All systems have their management models.

        • Nommer@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          With those requirements I would expect $500k with 6 weeks paid leave. What a bunch of clowns.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        9 months ago

        It can be viewed as a success. A bridge or building that only lasts five years wouldn’t be considered successful, especially if it took monumental effort to make it in the first place. For some reason, we don’t value that in software.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I wrote a Classic ASP app in 1999 that placed a web UI atop a mainframe application that dated to the late '70s and allowed easy navigation of really enormous data structures. I learned last year that it’s still in use at that company; amazing not just because my code is still around but because that fucking mainframe code is still running.

      • toofpic@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Oh, I’m sorry man. I don’t know everything, I’m working there less than a year, but I only heard of VB a couple of times. In order of popularity it’s like: C, C++, Java, then everything else

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I was just kidding - I haven’t touched Visual Basic in almost 20 years now. I’m not sure I could still code in it even if I wanted to.