Hacker News Reader

Comment by aoleinik | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, does knowing COBOL pay well in 2021? It seems COBOL programmers are in critical demand and free market economics should mean that COBOL programmers get paid premiums.

I would research this by myself, but not really sure where to start - and googling “COBOL Developer Salary” leads to results in the 80-120k range (which is no small number, but not significantly different from a modern language developer)

View on HN

No, it doesn't, at least not in my country (not the US).

It's a falsehood that often gets repeated. No, COBOL jobs don't pay particularly well. Plus they have the downside of, you know, having to work with COBOL, a horrible programming language. And mostly at banks and financial institutions, the main users of legacy COBOL systems.

I would also assume companies/banks hiring COBOL programmers are more interested in candidates with years of experience with the language, since opportunities to build and grow with COBOL seem pretty slim outside of legacy maintenance. Granted, the old COBOL heavy hitters are becoming less common, but I would still think it would be difficult for someone that picked it up for a year or two to compete. Seems like it's just not worth the time and effort to break into this space.

>Out of curiosity, does knowing COBOL pay well in 2021?

Apparently not sufficiently "well" to prevent a "shortage" of COBOL programmers.

Senior mainframe programmers seem to get paid less than entry level java/SQL programmers where I work at.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com