Companies want to pay less to work with COBOL? I was always told you’d get a nice bump to work with COBOL because so few people are still around to maintain these critical systems?
Same reason big tech companies are so desperately funding "learn to code" programs, especially in high school.
Don't think for a second that the software engineering gravy train won't come to a screeching end as soon as supply catches up with demand.
I wouldn't even be surprised if us SE's eventually try to heavily license and gatekeep the industry like law and medicine, loading new workers up with 6 figures of debt and significant post bachelors requirements, in order to keep our salaries artificially high. Medicine in the US seems to be especially damaged by this.
Ugh - I never thought of this (I work in IT) but I unfortunately could see this happening in the future. Weird times - Your healthcare example is unfortunately completely spot on
American medicine is made increasingly worse by legal liability.
From what I've observed by my conversations with friends and family in medicine, actual physicians increasingly do very little hands on work (with the exception of surgeons) and instead essentially just manage lesser educated technicians, especially RNs and advanced PAs, NPs, and CRNAs, who do the actual work. The physician essentially just stands around and observes but importantly takes most of the legal liability when things inevitably go wrong.
I think this is a huge part of the reason healthcare in the US is so expensive.
Perhaps the future of software engineering will look similar, with principle engineers and architects being like physicians. Extremely well educated, but almost no hands on experience writing code.
Could you imagine if there actually was legal liability for software developers? Imagine a world where ethics considerations actually mattered. Maybe we'd have fewer evil software corporations?
I'm on the wrong continent for FANG/VC funded startups. COBOL was still considered a downgrade vs Java/PHP/NodeJS/... , with a paycut. Why would they pay junior you more than they pay their senior cobolists now?
Of course, the pensioning age of those cobolists might give them a reason in the extremely near future ;-)
The whole point seems to be to convince people to learnt hat so they don't have to rely on some near-retirement people and also able to pay them less.