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Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

I don't like articles about COBOL, because most of them talk about how young people don't want to learn it. I'm fine with learning shitty technology. The real issue is the money. Look at the salaries for COBOL jobs. They suck shit.

If banks need to update their software, hire people and train them. It will take time, and time is money. That money could be invested into something else (there is an opportunity cost). If that something else is a higher priority to you, then maintaining the integrity of your critical software is not actually as important to you as you say it is.

I will not take a pay cut to work on COBOL for a bank.

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> I will not take a pay cut to work on COBOL for a bank.

You're probably just not the right type of personality. It seems that COBOL programmers have nice, slow paced, easy and safe jobs. That could be why there's so little hiring for COBOL programmers. Once you get someone, they stay put for decades until they retire. I'm sure there are plenty of programmers out there ready to drop the stressful sleepless start-up jobs and settle into something easy and 9-5, but perhaps don't know how to get from A to B.

I have a brother-in-law who is a COBOL programmer. Very much as you describe. I'd like to know more about it, honestly, but he's very much the kind of guy for whom work is just work and not interesting to talk about after hours. In his early fifties he is one of the youngest at his job - and despite having been at one company his whole career, he's one of the least longest-serving. We don't talk money, his lifestyle doesn't seem lavish but maintaining a single-income family in a high cost of living area is a lifestyle not to be sniffed at.

I'd say this totally depends on your area.

When I graduated most of my classmates were hired by the local branch of an international consultancy firm (hint: it's currently involved in a legal feud with the GOP in the US). Pay is below market average, and their job involves dealing with legacy Java and COBOL codebases. The Java part is OK, but they find COBOL very painful to work with. They are also required to do unpaid overtime due to hard deadlines.

On the other hand, a few of us went on to work for startups all over the country, and if you compare our careers ever since, they are like night and day. We can switch jobs easily due to having marketable skills (COBOL is a dead end outside a few companies) and we are making twice as much without working overtime.

I do not get why you say that COBOL programmers get paid less. Once you know everything about the systems and the language you should be able to get above market pay because you are really hard to replace. Pay me more or I leave would be a pretty easy management decision.

You would think, but no: programmers can never make more than managers. Management makes sure of it.

Poignant but ultimately true.

“Should” is the key word. I’ve looked at COBOL job listings every few years and I’ve never seen one for more than $90k US. So maybe once people are on the job maybe they have more leverage but those job listings don’t indicate any desperation for talent.

Look at daily rates, not permanent positions.

What daily rates do you see?

Right. I grew up hearing that COBOL and Fortran devs would become extinct and extremely valuable in my lifetime.

This mention this in the article. They used to grab people off the street and teach them COBOL, paid for by the banks. What happened between the 1960s and today that this type of practice stopped?

They realized they could wait around for the government to bail them out on this expense too?

Either it’s a really easy language to learn or the banks used to invest much more in teaching it than they do now (= zero).

If COBOL is so domain-specific, why not teach it as such on the job? Why is it the public’s fault for not investing in it?

> Either it’s a really easy language to learn or the banks used to invest much more in teaching it than they do now (= zero).

Very few companies invest in training these days. They expect schools and colleges to teach some professional skills (this is not what they should be doing) and invest as little as possible in new hires, specially for technical jobs.

> If COBOL is so domain-specific, why not teach it as such on the job? Why is it the public’s fault for not investing in it?

That's what my comment was saying. According to the article, the banks used to pay for their staff to learn COBOL on the job. It's 100% the financial industries fault that they have allowed this situation to arise. Why did that practice stop? I think this is one of the areas where capitalism is slowly failing in recent decades.

Presumably their codebases grew hairier and hairier and now it takes an enormous amount of work to change things without breaking stuff.

Maintaining and understanding legacy codebases is often something given to outsourcing companies too.

As it requires a deep understanding of how the monolith works and its connections to other applications, it usually needs to be done in conjunction with the support team which may be outsourced too.

I'm hearing that COBOL programmers are paid way above market rate right now.

wait it out, eventually it will have to go up as the old timers die off.

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