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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The IRS, treasury, and others locally are looking for COBOL programmers. I can explain why they're struggling to find any just by looking at the pay scale: $30,113 - $86,021 (GS-5 through GS-12, and most won't get the top end of the GS-12 scale). The $30K GS-5 starting is almost as low as working for their call center which is farcical.

By contrast state, county, and even city government are paying $65K - $85K starting going all the way up to $100K at the top end. And these are jobs where you're doing modern development, not COBOL.

People will start learning COBOL as soon as it makes rational sense. As it stands a lot of organizations aren't looking for any COBOL developer, they're looking for CHEAP COBOL developers. It doesn't make sense to learn when you'd lose money for taking those jobs.

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That mirrors my experience in mainframes. Out of college I was writing HLASM for zOS systems making roughly 65k in Houston. Definitely not bad for right out of college from a non-prestigious state school, and I was happy to have work. However, it seemed the upper bound on what I could earn there after climbing the entire ladder was 100k.

I decided to move to NYC and was making 100k immediately as a Jr RoR developer at a lean startup that was paying probably 10-15% below market.

It makes little to no sense for anyone with other options to take these incredibly low paying jobs relative to what they could be earning, doing what I would argue is far easier development work. It continues to baffle me that these major organizations claim a shortage of mainframe developers, especially as all the senior ones are retiring, yet their pay scale looks comparable to what department managers made when I worked at Circuit City.

This is exactly true. The pay is this low because there is a glut of cheap cobol developers in the US due to decades of off shoring. There have been 2000+ cobol developers laid off here over the past 5 years alone (medium midwest metro).

There cannot simultaneously be a surplus of COBOL developers and a shortage of COBOL developers.

Well, supposedly there could be one in the Midwest and one in NJ, but theoretically those who do not have a job in the Midwest would be motivated to move, since their only options are:

A) Remain jobless in Midwest.

B) Switch careers in Midwest.

C) Move to NJ for immediately available position.

The bigger question is why does a COBOL dev accept work for 60k when they could make 120k in Javascript?

Low salaries on offer convincingly reveal the true narrative. The question is why is the false narrative being promoted? Rather effectively at that.

> The bigger question is why does a COBOL dev accept work for 60k when they could make 120k in Javascript?

Structural unemployment due to ageism?

Pay scales are idiotic on purpose to force the government to fail to hire required employees and pay 5 times as much by hiring a private sector company. This is all working as designed.

Does IRS work with consultant firms? I can see how someone sets up a consulting shop, finds COBOL brogrammers and charges IRS $5k/hour.

> As it stands a lot of organizations aren't looking for any COBOL developer, they're looking for CHEAP COBOL developers.

This is one of my pet peeves. I am also thinking that it is outrageous that I am facing such lack of supply of Porsches. What? What do you mean, I should be paying more than a thousand bucks for a brand new Porsche? What sense would that make?

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