[Stwerner]

I've heard about a lot as well, especially in the banking industry, yet not actually met anyone. Does anyone have any data or any numbers on how much someone can get paid doing cobol legacy maintenance? Just for educational purposes of course.

[rluhar]

A lot of banks still have mainframes lurking somewhere on which they run (legacy?) accounting and settlement systems. Interestingly, a lot of the mainframe / COBOL programming jobs are outsourced, mainly to Indian companies. Infosys and TCS (the two huge outsourcing shops) actually train some graduates in Cobol / Mainframe programming. When I worked at ${Wall Street Bank}, we had an outsourced team in Chennai looking after a mainframe system. I had a quite a shock when I visited the Chennai office and discovered that most of the guys were straight out of college!

[Stwerner]

Ah so it isn't like theres all these American companies that are going to be paying top dollar to maintain their legacy, mission critical COBOL systems. They're outsourcing it for minimum wage.

[calebmpeterson]

An article [1] showed up on HN a while ago. In it the author gave a list of business which run their entire business on the mainframe. I work as a Java dev in rail transportation. The author is dead-on right - COBOL runs the world.

1. http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/hate-java-fight-wrong-b...

[Stwerner]

Yeah I remember that article, just don't see many jobs available, or any kinds of approximate numbers on what you could make for doing full time COBOL