Hacker News Reader

You’re looking at salaries for COBOL programmers in the UK which is a small subset of an already small market.

I've checked in America before and came to the same conclusion. There's an idea that COBOL programming pays vastly more than other languages, but it's just a myth. It might pay a little more, but more like 20% more. Certainly not enough to warrant a COBOL career.

And I'm sure some consultants can earn vast sums fixing old COBOL code, but that's just because they're consultants. Consultants always earn vast sums.

> Certainly not enough to warrant a COBOL career.

I don't understand why people are claiming this sets your career to only ever write COBOL. I know plenty of people who started their careers with perl, but have been Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, or Rust programmers at different points as their careers progressed.

Someone overseeing a project migrating a COBOL monolith over time to a set of decoupled services in some other language would easily have a strong story for the timeless need of improving application architecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com