Hacker News Reader

Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40 something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.

View on HN

I wonder if COBOL devs are doing fine.

My sister went to a shit college in India and was hired at one of the shit firms (I want to say Wipro, could've been Infosys). An entire batch of young, just graduated kids were trained on COBOL/batch processing for about 3 months. All of them were then placed to work with IBM, which in turn does that work offshore for US companies.

My sister left after the training, but she says a vast majority of her friends from the training still work at IBM doing COBOL. Each of that is probably 1/10th or so of an old COBOL dev's job gone.

I'll mention that COBOL devs are no longer doing just fine. I had an ex-coworker that had trouble finding well-paying COBOL jobs. A lot of it has been offshored or outsourced to low-paid consulting companies like Tata and the like.

I have anecdotal evidence of this as well. A local company that formerly employed thousands of cobol devs has had aggressive layoffs and offshoring over the past 10 years. Lots and lots of unemployed cobol devs here.

Sorry, I should've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16650380 as a reply here.

Can confirm, I'm in such a team now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com