| My father has been working in COBOL since the 80s, and his “reference” books are literally a couple of 4” 3 ring binders that he’s assembled over 40 years now of coding. Everytime the bank tries to switch away from COBOL they run into problems ranging from code latency to lack of support for certain features in the new language among other issues thus far. I really don’t know what the banks that run cobol mainframes are going to do as most have ignored the Father Time problem where cobol programmers aren’t getting any younger and the language, in my opinion, is miserable compared to the “magic” of newer era languages. My pops also has made less money then I did as an engineer at a tech co with 3 years experience so banks aren’t valuing the work these folks do very much either. I’ve told my pops he can do consulting once he retires and make a killing because there’s gonna be a major shortage of cobol folks and a massive amount of mainframe code out there that needs maintenance or a transition into a newer era language. Edit:
- The author is wrong here “If you need to change old programs, hiring experienced programmers and teaching them COBOL is the cheap part.” There is not a surplus of developers or entry level folks willing to learn cobol over another entry level language, so it’s not cheap and it’s not “easy”. |
Wrong, there are literally 10,000s of former cobol developers due to decades of offshoring. I know of several thousand in from one local company alone. Go look for these job listings, you won't find them because they're all offshore.