* Scaleway is totally painful/scary on data encryption at rest and in transit, does not feel like your infra/data is isolated from other customers
* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS
On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !
I found scaleway's IAM system pretty solid so far. Right balance between "gives you nightmares" (GCP) and "one key to rule them all" (Hetzner.. Bunny.. and so many others)
Having done in the same day 6 hours of psycho-technical and psycho-motor tests at Air France to get into their "Pilote Cadet" program (4h in the morning then 2h in the afternoon after a lunch break), I definitely felt my mental speed during high load+stress at 32 was already a lot slower than at 20 in engineering school. I never felt so brain exhausted and I concluded I was not that sharp anymore ...
> Having done in the same day 6 hours of psycho-technical and psycho-motor tests at Air France to get into their "Pilote Cadet" program I definitely felt my mental speed during high load+stress at 32 was already a lot slower than at 20 in engineering school. I never felt so brain exhausted and I concluded I was not that sharp anymore ...
This is why none of the answers here make any sense.
Many seem to want to blame this on desk jobs and sitting. Others on not learning new things.
Then you have examples of super-high cognitive workload and stress saying this is the problem.
These things don't fit together.
I hold a US CPL and work as a programmer at a desk job. Where exactly does that leave me?
From personal experience riding in the chaos that is Paris traffic for almost 10 years. I really scared myself maybe 3-4 times with bicycles running red lights at full speed.
=> Regular drivers are paying quite good attention because they need their car to go to work the next day, the real danger comes from newcomers and people who don't drive often (tourists, old people, families on weekends, etc.)
=> Anything that does not require a license (especially all these new stupid fast electric things that go over 20kmh) will make crazy tight turns without checking anything. They will get away with everything and never get stopped by the police, they don't have insurance and will not get fined for anything.
So I would add:
- Don't overspeed in traffic jams
- Don't ever come close to a bus or truck, moving or stopped (massive blind spots + not going to feel a thing running over you)
- Don't mess with car drivers (they will try to run over you and your 200kg bike)
- There will ALWAYS be a **** crazy biker with a death wish riding faster than you, whatever your speed is
IMO it's quite following the same trends as the stock market. Elon Musk makes statements on Twitter about how Bitcoin is an environmental disaster and rolls back on accepting Bitcoin in payments for Teslas. Bitcoin goes down.
IBM mainframes virtual machines saying hello => "It is directly based on technology and concepts dating back to the 1960s"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/VM
Until some COBOL developer publishes his pay slip, I will stick to reality, top IT salaries are at tech giants.
From personal experience: BNP Paribas is one of the biggest bank in the world, top 5 if you exclude Chinese state owned ones, and they pay mainframe related jobs like shit.
Being young, smart and with a whole career ahead, you have no future working has a COBOL developer, no one should spend his life picking up shitty code left by his elders decades ago.
> no one should spend his life picking up shitty code left by his elders decades ago.
Would you say that to a civil engineer who works on infrastructure maintenance?
Computing is critical infrastructure in many areas of government and business. The solution to all problems cannot be “screw it, we’ll just rewrite in Go with a React frontend.” Some things should be rewritten and some should be maintained.
Have you ever worked on an IT infrastructure where there is no comments in the source code, no documentation, no normalization, no specs? I am not talking about COBOL itself, I am talking about those COBOL jobs, it's only about fixing and/or maintaining. I hope no one is writing new things in COBOL.
Back in the day... COBOL programmers were often 'analysts' as well - meeting with the end users and/or management to design and then implement the required system.
Funny to me how so many in this thread rag on COBOL, yet when other languages come up it is always 'well this language is good for abc but I wouldn't really do xyz in that one'. COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lots of it.
> COBOL is extremely good at what it was designed for - data processing, and lots of it.
Well, the hardware that COBOL usually runs on is good for that, sure. And its usually (now) running legacy systems that no one wants the risk of reimplementing from the ground up. But is the language itself particularly well-suited to the task? I think that’s less clear. Certainly, I’ve never seen a coherent argument about how the language itself is superior to modern alternatives even for large scale data processing; if it was, it would be popular for greenfield projects in that domain, you’d think.
One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this. Having a decimal fixed point type makes monetary calculations easier to do more reliably.
> One thing I have heard about COBOL is that it has a built in, decimal fixed point type. Very few of the modern languages have an native type like this..
What modern language doesn’t have either fixed-point or arbitrary-precision decimals (or both) in either the core language or standard library?
I mean, sure, C doesn’t (and I don’t think C++ does), but those aren’t particularly modern languages.
In don’t think that Java fits the bill either in this regard. White it does have BigDecimal in the standard library, it is both slower(because object and supports arbitrary precision) and more cumbersome (no operator overloading ) than a native type.
I can see a case for decimal floating point types, but fixed point adds nothing beyond what can be performed directly via arithmetic on the underlying integers. It's basically a convenience feature.
It's suited for a very specific kind of data processing. It's a kind which isn't typically used today.
The language combines presentation and storage in a way I've never seen in any other language. Let's say you have an 8 digit variable. You can then specify that the last two digits is represented by a different variable, and thus the second variable will only work on those last two digits.
This is useful when you have formatted fields, where you have a variable that holds an ISO 8601 date, with other variables representing the year, month and day parts.
In a language like Java, you need to create a class that holds this information, with separate methods to manipulate the individual components and formatting the output.
In COBOL you only need a few lines of declarations to do this.
The drawback is that now presentation is tightly associated with the data storage, meaning that changing presentation format can be a lot of work. This is why COBOL programs were so problematic during Y2K.
That is true, but you have to understand that not everybody is FAANG material. The top 5-15 tech companies receive hundreds of thousands of resumes every year of which less than 1% are selected. Also not everybody is interested in moving in to the tech hubs. There is still lot of work in legacy code - COBOL, Oracle and other legacy systems.
Even in newer languages like Java, there is lot of work that is mostly application maintenance and adding new features to existing decade old applications. It is not bad work.
Yes and that's always the discussion when people from US come in to visit to the french part of companies. "Hey we heard that you are paid 5 to 10 times less than us, why do you accept that?"
Trust me, it's worth it. Really, it's not that much effort and it's worth it to signal to recruiters your real worth. And don't forget not all recruiters are equal.
And the visa issue is way overblown. It's easier than you think for a real engineer with experience.
* OVHCloud is good if you deploy your production in HA fashion with higher tiers or do multi-region yourself using a vRack, real issue that they made the news with burning DCs, the fact that the customer base has been originally a gazillion cheap web servers does not help big companies going in, they are going somewhere on the SaaS
On most European cloud providers I feel like IAM is crap: workload identity is almost non-existent, API keys management is usually hellish. Same goes for encryption/isolation. I want to hear more technical feedback on most of them, devil is in the details !