Is COBOL still used by banks? The people I know who work in two different major UK banks suggest everything is Java now, with Oracle as the preferred database solution.
Yes, absolutely. A friend of mine makes his living optimising COBOL programs on IBM mainframes. It turns out there's a pile of cash to made offering to take a look at people's code in return for a cut of the first year of savings when they're paying by the CPU-second.
Nothing beats a mainframe for throughput & reliability and lots of the code is still COBOL.
IIRC SocGen has a vast amount of code written in some awful monstrosity of an internal language that nobody else has used for decades, but the cost of changing everything over to something more modern is so prohibitive that they just keep on accreting over the existing codebase.
Thanks for the links - looks like the COBOL jobs are not promoted as much (I couldn't find any on the four bank sites I looked at) but still there, and reasonably well paid too.
Most of those COBOL jobs were offshored or are now performed by Indian/Asian vendor non-immigrant visa holders imported.
Within hour drive from my house, I can tally at least a half-dozen corporate IT shops that outsourced heavily in this way, axing thousands (in aggregate) of jobs that normally were served by internal/domestic consulting houses.
Yes, on the backend there is still a lot of COBOL, even if it is running on micro-hardware as opposed to the old big iron. Claims adjudication, utility metering, charge card processing, billing for just about any corporation that existed pre-1980, etc.…
