alt Hacker Newsalmost all major financial institutions, utilities, gov't agencies, etc still rely heavily on COBOL today. If it ain't (extremely) broken, don't fix it?
COBOL developers are literally dying out which has made for a competitive market for remaining talent. I've heard of some large consultants charging over $500/hr to their clients for a COBOL developer!
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In COBOL implementations, it's generally not just knowledge of the language that makes you valuable, it's knowledge of the implementation at that particular organization. I'm not a COBOL dev myself, but I work with them, and part of the challenge is that everything is so uber-customized, tightly coupled, and there's 40+ years of undocumented business logic buried in the code.
It's like the old joke about the engineer being asked for an itemized bill: "Chalk mark: $1. Knowing where to put it: $4,999."
That seems like a myth to me. I actually looked up COBOL salaries and they were a bit higher (like 20%) but definitely not enough to make them tempting.
I think the moat that COBOL developers have is not just their knowledge of the language, but knowledge of the mainframe programming and operating environment. Its just so alien to developers familiar with Windows/Linux, and there is really no way to get experience with the environment that I know of, other than to be employed doing it.
But yeah that stuff is never going away as far as I can tell. Its just too risky to rewrite those core systems and many a boondoggle has tried and failed.
I work for a major utility and they used to run everything on mainframe and cobol but that went away long before I started programming. My coworker is nearing retirement, around 30 years here, and he started on cobol and worked on transitioning off. He has some really fun stories but my point being, the tales of cobol prevalence are very exaggerated. Maybe some parts of finance are still using it, not my area.
Can't we just apply a bunch of correctness preserving translations towards a modern PL, perhaps aided by an LLM to keep the source as human readable as possible, while (I'm stressing this) preserving correctness?
Not a bad gig to take if you can swallow your pride a bit.
I bet LLMs can make working with COBOL a lot easier and more fun than it ever was. I bet that's true for a lot of legacy stuff.
That’s for specialists for the mainframe or specific skill.
Generalists are usually offshored and are cheap.
It is very much broken and said institutions don’t like it
COBOL jobs are not particularly well paid in my country.
In any case, they would have to pay well by a large margin to justify working on dead boring legacy systems, too.
I feel like every time COBOL is mentioned we get these stories about crazy high comp for COBOL developers, but anecdotally my aunt worked on COBOL projects in the mid 2010s and was paid a much more modest 45 $/hr. Good money for small town middle America where she lives, but nowhere close to what a decent JS dev can get.