very true. i think there's a feeling with those guys that the work is inevitably dwindling away, but if they can ride the gravy train until retirement then they'll be just fine. It's a bit of a gamble that the work won't run out, leaving them with a skill that's no longer used.
Who knows in 20 years that may be the case with Ruby devs, getting paid huge amounts of money to keep ancient systems running!
very true. i think there's a feeling with those guys that the work is inevitably dwindling away, but if they can ride the gravy train until retirement then they'll be just fine. It's a bit of a gamble that the work won't run out, leaving them with a skill that's no longer used.
Heh. 20 years ago COBOL was seen in the same legacy "nobody uses it" way it is now :-) I guarantee those two would make the same decision again today - and they'd be right.
The gravy train is only just getting started. COBOL will not go away in my lifetime. People are still writing new COBOL code - and there are fewer skilled COBOL devs out there. There are millions of lines of business critical COBOL running out there in the world.
Usually in businesses that are bright enough to realise that rewriting business critical systems is far more risky than maintaining the existing code (e.g. I was told a few years ago that one particular Large Financial Organisation had taken on an in-house compiler team to reduce the risk of their system becoming unsupportable in the future.)
Don't get me wrong, I think nothing bad of anybody that works in a niche. I just think of it as possible high risk for possible high reward. I might not even include COBOL because it has such a foothold in certain industries. It's just not a new, sexy language. I myself programmed in Pascal back in the day :-)
I was thinking more about some other guys I've ran into. One guy was an expert at this proprietary DB system and slowly would lose clients but somehow always found a new one - charging very high rates. I knew a guy who was quite old when I started and he was an expert with magnetic tape technology! His luck actually did run out, though, his whole department was phased out one day and he had to re-tool (and went into line printers interestingly)
It's really hard to say which of them hang on or not, I have some technologies under my own belt that I feel the same about!
Who knows in 20 years that may be the case with Ruby devs, getting paid huge amounts of money to keep ancient systems running!