Memes

too be fair I studied Latin at school 40 years ago so this tracks

I work with COBOL programmers who came to Australia as adult refugees from an American war in South East Asia

The Stackoverflow developer survey debunks this myth, year after year. Not only do COBOL developers make about the middle of the pack, they sit at an average of 18 YOE which makes absolute bank in other stacks

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language

Yes.

The idea that a job req could actually ask for "50+ years experience" in a given piece of computing technology just gives me goosebumps. Like someone did a really good job 50 years ago, or a really bad one. Either way, it's astonishing that any one thing could be in production use that long or longer.

Contractors make a lot of money, but that would be separate to standard engineering salaries

I've known a few people that graduated about a decade ago and decided to work in really niche tech like COBOL, Salesforce/SOQL/SOSL, VB6, Sitecore, etc. Hell, one guy I met was a professional "ActionScript" programmer! Many in-store and company kiosks used Flash to program their interfaces, so he'd do basic maintenance, add features, and collect six figures for half a year of work and all the travel around Europe/Asia he wants.

or because the average experience for them is 58 years

Some have more?!

Like all old systems, do nothing and pray it doesn't shit itself.

It's too lucrative to die completely, somebody will always be there to take it up.

Somebody has to RTFM :(

They are alive, we employ some

New folks are learning it. Obviously not in droves, and obviously there is a lot of legacy knowledge, but new people are def training on it.

TL;DR: it's probably not that hard to pick up compared to the complex and deep stacks we use today. Someone will give it a shot.

COBOL is in a special place in our computing legacy. It's too new to require intimate knowledge of the electronics that drive it (older systems and machine-code did), and is too old to be all that complicated (target machines were much smaller and slower). I would wager it's actually not that hard to learn, and is probably a dream to code with modern equipment. You won't be slowed down by punchcards, tape drives, time sharing, etc., and can probably use VSCode and an emulator to cover a ton of ground. The computing model is likely a straight line (storage -> compute -> storage), with little to no UI. In other words: simple by today's standards.

Fr tho what happens when all the COBOL programmers die off?

Uh, how do you think learning programming languages works exactly?

Maybe we can extract COBOL programmer DNA from a prehistoric mosquito that got stuck in amber, and then combine it with frog DNA to produce a new generation of COBOL programmers? We could build a facility for this on some remote island, maybe call it COBOL Park or something?

People think there's job security in this, but there's really not. I have been called in to replace archaic code with more modern/easier to read code.

It pays very well.

And there have been companies that are paying millions to a small firm to rewrite their COBOL software that covers the same feature set but also opens the door to extendability.

Niche skills will demand higher salaries. Thus you'll still get a few that learn it just to enter the niche.

Well, I guess they will, once these folks retire and start running for president.

Lol, we all wish.

Nah they're using Fortran.

Yes, I mean it's used for transactions in the programming sense of the word. Turns out financial transactions require that as well. I assume the same goes for nuclear stuff. There is just very little risk to come across uncertainties when the language is that old (and the people who use it hehe - tbf it pays super well).

Edit: at least to my very limited knowledge

So the mouse remains compliant!