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Comment by rimmjob | Hacker News Reader

i always hear about how many jobs there are for cobol programmers to maintain legacy code. i've never actually met any though. maybe they all commit suicide.

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My only encounter with the mythical COBOL Legacy Architect was at one job where we indadvertedly shared a desk. Since he was only in the office about 2 hours a months, others had assumed it was an empty cube and put me there. The rest of the time, he was making consulting bank in his mountain cabin. I think other than myself and the CIO, maybe 3 people knew who the guy was.

The flipside is that probably 90% of mainframe programmers were washed out of the industry in the mid-1990s. I remember seeing tons of useless resumes full of RPG and JCL and no C++/Oracle/Java/WinNT or whatever was hot back then.

I've heard about a lot as well, especially in the banking industry, yet not actually met anyone. Does anyone have any data or any numbers on how much someone can get paid doing cobol legacy maintenance? Just for educational purposes of course.

An article [1] showed up on HN a while ago. In it the author gave a list of business which run their entire business on the mainframe. I work as a Java dev in rail transportation. The author is dead-on right - COBOL runs the world.

1. http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/06/hate-java-fight-wrong-b...

Yeah I remember that article, just don't see many jobs available, or any kinds of approximate numbers on what you could make for doing full time COBOL

A lot of banks still have mainframes lurking somewhere on which they run (legacy?) accounting and settlement systems. Interestingly, a lot of the mainframe / COBOL programming jobs are outsourced, mainly to Indian companies. Infosys and TCS (the two huge outsourcing shops) actually train some graduates in Cobol / Mainframe programming. When I worked at ${Wall Street Bank}, we had an outsourced team in Chennai looking after a mainframe system. I had a quite a shock when I visited the Chennai office and discovered that most of the guys were straight out of college!

Ah so it isn't like theres all these American companies that are going to be paying top dollar to maintain their legacy, mission critical COBOL systems. They're outsourcing it for minimum wage.

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