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by mlhpdx 928 days ago
It’s more than that. If you spend a couple or more years learning to maintain those systems, where else will you work? Will you find a co-founder or investor for a COBOL based system when you go “entrepreneur”? Maybe, but it better be a damn strong niche.

Not moving forward with the software industry is a weird kind of conceit that separates these companies from the mainstream by far more than money.
2 comments
serallak 928 days ago
I don't think it'd take two years to learn cobol, it should be less than that.

But it will take much more than that to learn the gnarly codebase in use in those shops...

And that is a skill that is certainly not transferable.

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exhilaration 928 days ago
I don't think it'd take two years to learn cobol, it should be less than that.

There's a comment in this thread from a former consultant that completed a 4 week COBOL bootcamp before being sent to a client to write code!

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wombatpm 928 days ago
It’s not the language, it’s the business rules and history.

Why is this input file loaded and rechecked 3 times? Because 30 years ago a file load failed, breaking end of quarter reports. This was the fix: if we can read that file three times and it doesn’t change then we know it’s good

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rightbyte 928 days ago
It still comes down to paying enough money for someone to do it. Pay me twice what I make now and I'll switch to coding absurd legacy all-caps COBOL systems in a heart beat. Probably less then that too.
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