Apparently there are a lot of states looking for COBOL programmers to help with their old systems because of the coronavirus. If you’re like me it may be time to brush off those old skills and maybe make some decent money consulting.
never used COBOL :´(
A little less of the ‘ancient’ please 
I took a year of COBOL in school back in the 70’s (antique not ancient)… but never used it in a real world job.
only briefly to help government tax auditors extract data from our accounting systems
No CICS / COBOL / DL/I takers?
never touched CICS
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
DISPLAY ‘I remember COBOL’.
STOP RUN.
Man you are far kinder to your tax auditors and we are. Helping when I have a plausible “I don’t know how to run that old language”??
It wasnt optional
We either assisted or they find us “non-compliant” and that could lead to huge financial penalties and all kinds of bad things for stock prices etc
This was in a highly regulated field
I imagine telling the IRS “go pound sand” would get you about the same effect there 
I was one of the testers for Apple /// COBOL. Hated it then and still do.
It was OK.
We’ve had better since but I found it serviceable.
Remember the 1999 work to increase the space used to store years from 2 to 4 characters?
[quote=483273:@Jeff Tullin]It was OK.
We’ve had better since but I found it serviceable.
Remember the 1999 work to increase the space used to store years from 2 to 4 characters?[/quote]
Very well although I wasnt working in Cobol - a similar language
Audited the entire payroll and several accounting interfaces
I was part of the team that had written the payroll system nearly a decade earlier - never changed one line of that code (I was so happy about that !)
LOL… at that time I was head architecht for a massive HealthCare Provider/Patient system (600k+ provider, and no idea how many patients)… When Y2K remediation was required… I just sat back and laughed… the language it was written in was Y2K compliant from the day it was released (in the early 80’s). I did still have to pass all the “tests”… but my systems were certified months before any other department.
pretty much the same here
had to do the work just to prove it
in what we used basically the DB & language were one & the same and so to be lazy and not have to sort data by dates all the time we had used 4 digit yearsand 2 digits for everything else YYYYMMDDHHMMSS and the data was naturally ordered by date and time
It was so common to need data by date that this just made sense
but - they paid me to do all the tests and verifications
plus other work
I didnt mind
You hated COBOL or the Apple /// ? (Or Both!)
COBOL. The Apple /// was a decent machine but the wrong machine for the time. It was meant to be Apple’s leap into the business environment but IBM pretty much owned that space since their machines supposedly cooperated well with the mainframes.
[quote]we had used 4 digit yearsand 2 digits for everything else YYYYMMDDHHMMSS and the data was naturally ordered by date and time
It was so common to need data by date that this just made sense[/quote]
Kids today ’ we survived the Millenium bug, we can survive this…’
Someone find me a big stick.
I got my COBOL programmer certification when I was 16y/o, so it was in 1981. And then I started to write… BASIC, a bit of C, and much Z80 Assembly. 
Then, in 1985, I had to develop a requested business software for a Unix mini computer in a mid sized but millionaire company, and that computer had 3 options: Interpreted Basic, C and COBOL. Basic had only sequential and random (direct like an indexed vector), C would be very verbose and needed libs they hadn’t for proper database manipulation, sooo… COBOL had indexed fields… and good Report capabilities. That way, COBOL was the language. Less than one year later another company poached me from there, because C and Assembly code programmers were very rare. But such company used my software for years until replacing that computer by a new networked generation (the Unix one used dumb terminals) as networking was invented and Netware was gaining traction and CLIPPER also came in. I loved CLIPPER those years (1987+).
Ah… So you are “old like Norm” then …
I can say this as I got you both beat