Competition for Programmers

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What will happen when everybody panics and begins aggresive recruiting of anybody who is a proven programmer, Cobol or not? Won't we have people (making megabucks by the way) unfamiliar with old and complex systems introduce more bugs than they fix, fail to produce any working systems at all or more likely get recruited out from under their current employer before they even finish a project? Who would turn down an offer of 250,000 from a desperate company facing bankruptcy? Maybe computer programmers will need agents?

-- Clifford Robert Bradley (Clifford_R_Bradley@msn.com), June 02, 1998

Answers

I looked at the job posting section of http://www.cobol.com and found very few jobs listed there with almost all of them looking for senior people.

I could see a demand for testers because most of the projects will move into that stage soon.

-- Reg Smith (rrr@ibm.net), June 02, 1998.


As I understand it there are programmers out there really scrabbling to read through all those lines of COBOL, etc. Is it possible that someone (like myself) who is somewhat familiar with programming languages and procedure (but definitely not a true programmer) could be of assistance to some of the "scrabblers"? I am suggesting that the "scrabblers" could tell someone how to flag places that needed fixing and that this might save the "scrabblers" valuable time needed for actual fixing and recoding. Any thoughts on such a possibility? [Food for thought: Such a person would obviously save companies money as they would not command the high fees of the programmers.] themselves.]

-- Martha Rodger (mrodger@sprynet.com), July 30, 1998.

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