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Comment by intelVISA | Hacker News Reader

As a C++ enjoyer I would 100% have learned Rust if it was around when I started... just for Cargo alone.

Problem is now I've already done my time in the Makefile trenches there's little incentive in me re-learning another systems lang and having to compete with lots of smarter people, with more Rust exp, for jobs whilst giving up all my arcane knowledge of CMake and friends.

Rust being popular atm is great for C++ if I'm honest as it siphons away a new gen of systems programmers over to another lang allowing me to sell my dark services for more coins.

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> it siphons away a new gen of systems programmers over to another lang allowing me to sell my dark services for more coins

I've always been curious about whether it really works this way. First order, one would consider supply and demand leading to increased wages. But whenever I've looked into the reports of "COBOL programmers are getting paid a fortune because there are so few of them alive!", the reality has been that wages are ... unimpressive.

My hypothesis is that as the talent pool shifts elsewhere, the market dries up. For instance, new projects aren't started in COBOL any more (well, at least anywhere I've seen...). You're left doing maintenance on ancient systems, where the calculus is always "this needs to be cheaper than a new solution". Maybe it's the "liquidity" of the job market for a given language?

No doubt, though it's worth considering the tech industry is a bit more diversified now than the days of COBOL number crunchers and Space Invaders. What you're describing seems closer to PHP vs. Javascript than something as entrenched as idio-matic legacy C++.

And heck, if I'm wrong I'm sure somewhere like AWS will entomb me as an SRE, or some such, so even long after I'm RMA'd my spaghetti abominations can continue to haunt the cloud.

I did my time in the Makefile trenches, too. I'm happy that I've learned other languages. There will always be smarter people than you, but you will bring your particular knowledge and do new things. Keep on learning!

I wonder how the Cobol market is doing?

I was a Cobol developer for a year in 2016 in Prague. It's hard to make a proper market research because the Cobol market is small. My limited point of view is, that it's not worth the stress. There is nothing new to build with it and young developers are there just to replace the old ones and maintain what's left. Even that it's hard to find a Cobol developer, i couldn't find a Cobol position that would pay more than a React developer.

The funny part about cobol is that even if you say you know the syntax, there is site specific implementation details/features which are even MORE critical than just the language.

My favourite example of this is that you have to recompile program when a used table schema changes, otherwise it will crash.

edit: Just realized that it's more platform specific than site specific.

If you have time, I would really love to know examples of this. This is very interesting.

See: New Jersey State Unemployment Insurance.

you have picked up so much meta knowledge (debugging, testing, build optimizations), domain understanding and soft skills that making the switch might be less tough than you think. Plenty of coins in Rust land, too!

The incentive is to do it for the greater good. For a safer, better future.

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