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#jobs-discuss
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2017-05-05
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bherrmann02:05:13

Does anyone have experience working for or hiring consultants from http://toptal.com ? They say they let you “Hire the top 3% of freelance Clojure developers” https://www.toptal.com/clojure

seancorfield02:05:08

Never heard of them. I’ll be interested to hear what people say about them.

jumar06:05:09

I heard @bozhidar mentioned that he works for Toptal - maybe he has some interesting info

bherrmann16:05:46

wow, they have the top 3% of freelance COBOL programmers also….

lmergen18:05:27

that implies there are more than 30 cobol developers in the world... :thinking_face:

jeffmk18:05:14

The top 3% of COBOL programmers is this guy with a really long, white beard sitting in the basement.

mobileink18:05:06

should i put cobol/jcl/bal on my resume if i'm going for a clojure job? heh.

mobileink18:05:20

@lmergen $billions invested in cobol systems. probably bal too - i once worked on a banking system that was written entirely in assembler.

lmergen18:05:18

yeah, it was more tongue in cheek. i actually understood that COBOL devs are in incredibly high demand, earning great salaries

mobileink18:05:24

i'd never even think about going back, but if job security is your thing...

mobileink18:05:39

yeah, that hurts. i probably could have made a bundle during the Y2K scare, but that was too depressing to contemplate.

lmergen18:05:19

haha yeah the problem is, if you don't do it, somebody else will

tjg20:05:16

I wonder if you can make a nice Linj for COBOL. (“Linj” is a lisp-like language that outputs readable Java. Jnil does the reverse—take Java & compiles it to readable Linj.) https://github.com/xach/linj/blob/master/doc/java-for-lispers.pdf

mobileink20:05:26

clojurbol, anybody?

mobileink20:05:59

i did learn one really terrific language in my mainframe days - Rexx. Netrexx was the first non-java language to target the jvm, and still on of the best, second only to clojure: http://www.netrexx.org

seancorfield23:05:36

I don’t have COBOL on my résumé but I did a lot of it in the early 80's, including porting Microfocus COBOL to the Sun 4 (before it was called SPARC) and the Motorola 78000 (before it was renamed 88000). The former became Sun COBOL 1.0. Their compiler was written primarily in COBOL(!) with a small portable bootstrap written in C, and then you had to write a tiny loader for each platform in assembler. It was designed around a virtual machine, a full decade before the JVM…

seancorfield23:05:05

…I don’t have COBOL on my résumé because I don’t want recruiters offering me “lucrative maintenance contracts” for it.

seancorfield23:05:15

(nor do I have FORTRAN on it, for similar reasons… and, at this point, I should probably remove C, C++, Prolog, and a few other things that I no longer want to work in!)