NetSuite paid for my house...I think that should say enough about the benefit of the system. Find a niche. Get good in it and drive some value. People have been asking if NS is a good long term play since I got into it in 2009 and so far so good.

Been doing it since 2013-2014 here and so far so good as well.

I was asked by workmates "Why would you work on such a niche system?" 11 years later my salary is a good 30% more than the highest paid of any of them. 🍺

Niches can be good. I had coworkers asking the COBOL devs at my last job “Why would you use such an old language?” They are all paid higher than any other developers in the company, and when layoffs happened recently, they were all considered essential and kept their jobs, while many Java devs were let go.

I did PL/1 at Experian, they offshored my job to India 🤣

I wanted to go work at spacex till i saw the salaries. Its like i'll just stay here and add buttons and be a script kid and not take a 100k paycut.

I knew a guy that quit to go work as a game developer, taking a pay cut and a big drop in benefits to do so, because it was his dream job. That was before he had kids and needed a bigger house. Now he’s back to a corporate gig :)

oh yeah if i didn't have kids that would be fun to do

Sounds like heaven

COBOL devs at my place are also immune to RIF. Lots of middle aged men with the occasional smile mixed in.

I was talking to a kid from PWC day before yesterday - who was telling me that their bosses are encouraging them to get in to NS realm from their usual SAP and Oracle practice. They are seeing the trend.

tangent - Has anyone actually ever successfully implemented SAP? I have heard of numerous examples of companies starting to implement it, and failing to get it to the finish line after years and abandoning it. Are there actual success stories?

I have seen companies posting picture of a go-live of SAP ERP..

SAP implementation is a joke, it never finishes and cost ballooning from initial spec. So many high profile billion dollar horror stories about SAP implementations, Target Canada (7 billion), Dutch Post (1 billion), Hershey's 100 million dollar SAP boobo

What still uses COBOL? I've heard for years that a lot of banking stuff still uses COBOL and that they're hesitant to switch it out. Is it all banking or is there other stuff?

average salaries for COBOL programmers jumped 44% between 2021 and 2022

adjusted for inflation, that’s like a 1% raise, nice!

I got a 2% last year... living the high life. I make less than when I started for this current place due to inflation.

I got 4.8% though rest of my team got 6% - rational is that I am part of management with higher salary already so all Managers got 4.8%. Still less than the inflation

yeah they used "you're the highest paid one here" against me too

tell me about it

also got only a portion of a bonus bc of sales even though I held up my end of things... its def demoralizing when companies do that kinda stuff.

I am seriously thinking of starting a boutique consulting service where SME's can collaborate

The company I used to work was facing some issues with the salary. They paid everyone except me and few managers. I was the technical manager. But I was also remote and had the lowest salary among others due to currency conversion. They told me "all the managerial staff haven't received salary".

holy crap just not paid at all?

They paid later after I refused to work without salary.

as you should have! that's crazy

I went radio silent. Not responding to clients and teams.