re: Fired IT employees sue LSU

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I’m pretty sure most banks and airlines still use COBOL. Yeah, it’s old. But it’s still around.

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Every single poster that banks with Regions, Wells Fargo, and Compass has their financials being processed with COBOL.

Don't worry some of your smaller banks are leveraging VB and Access.

This is not uncommon at all.

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sometimes it is actually cheaper to maintain the legacy system than the time and expense involved with a new one.

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This is true only until hardware replacements become difficult or impossible to get. Sometimes installed bases are large enough that third party vendors continue to supply components until it declining demand puts an end to that. It gets very expensive as this starts to happen and it is wise to mitigate that before you find yourself dead in the water with no readily available replacement component.

Of course my experience is primarily with industrial control systems rather than mainframe computers but I suspect that is a near universal truth when dealing with maturing and obsolete hardware systems of any sort.

When I was there, the student “mainframe” was 10 XT processors running in parallel, which was terrific until 150 students had deadlines around the same date.

By XT, I mean the old 8080 or 8088 CPU that predates the x86 CPU models.

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I actually think they kind of have a point.

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LSU should have been aware of the law, but these people made their money - including moving expenses to not actually move - and then resigned. I'm not sure I understand what damages they can expect to receive in a lawsuit.

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The plan was for these 4 IT admins to collaborate with Workday and other LSU constituents to build a new system dubbed "Workday Student" thereby bridging everything into one core

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Workday Student already exists and did exist somewhat when LSU signed on for HR and Financials....LSU did agree to help Workday perfect it....but many universities use it today including University of Texas system, Ohio State, and University of Miami to name a few. LSU botched it's relationship with Workday from what I heard when they weren't willing to invest in the talent to do it correctly. That was a bad call for LSU....Workday is on a roll as a software provider

ETA in an effort to divulge everything I'm a Workday developer for a major corporation in Houston. Obviously we don't use the Student module but I have some insight into it.

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Apparently it's very popular.

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....do it for the Fortune 500

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Every single poster that banks with Regions, Wells Fargo, and Compass has their financials being processed with COBOL. 

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I heard a while back that WF was working with Workday to make their Financials module more banking friendly....I think they already use HR with Workday. Who knows you hear that shite all the time....I know Walmart and Amazon are working with Workday on some procurement stuff though....I had a pretty good interview with WalMart but ultimately relocating to NW Arkansas wasn't in the cards.

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fricking COBOL? I havent even thought of that language since the early 90s. That is pathetic. And still using a half century old IBM mainframe? Embarassing for a "flagship" university.

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Wait until the replacement turns out to be SAP.

You think you're seeing wasted money now, ha.

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It would cost but you could hire young programmers and teach them cobol. A programmer that is worth a damn should be able to use any language presented to them.

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I agree, The language is but a tool. But you would have to pay me well over market rate comapred to say C#, Ruby, Python, etc.. to do this. The majority of devs that came up on COBOL are retiring or dead.

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....do it for the Fortune 500

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Think COBOL is dead? About 95 percent of ATM swipes use COBOL code, Reuters reported in April, and the 58-year-old language even powers 80 percent of in-person transactions. In fact, Reuters calculates that there’s still 220 billion lines of COBOL code currently being used in production today, and that every day, COBOL systems handle $3 trillion in commerce. Back in 2014, the prevalence of COBOL drew some concern from the trade newspaper American Banker.

“The mainframe was supposed to have been be replaced by farms of smaller commodity servers and cloud computing by now, but it still endures at many banks,” the trade pub reported.

But should we be concerned that so much of our financial infrastructure runs on an ancient infrastructure? American Banker found 92 of the top 100 banks were still using mainframe computers — and so were 71 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500. As recently as five years ago, the IT group at the Bank of New York Mellon had to tend to 112,500 different COBOL programs — 343 million lines of code, according to a 2012 article in Computerworld. And today a quick Google search today shows the Bank of New York Mellon is still hiring COBOL developers.

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Article from 2017



Sounds like, while it may not be the wave of the future, it is still very, very important to the present.

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According to IBM, 92 of the top 100 banks use mainframes and 71% of all Fortune 500 companies have their core businesses on a mainframe

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