5 ms·

Legacy code buried in enterprises will always need supporting skills. With aging workforce that coded for mainframes, COBOL will pay more in near future IMO.

• danieltillett 11y ago
  Isn’t the problem with COBOL not that learning COBOL is hard, but that you need so much domain knowledge about how the legacy code work?
  • icelancer 11y ago
    The problem is mostly that it's boring as shit. I did a stint as a COBOL developer / systems admin for a bit out of college since I actually took COBOL classes in college (believe it or not this is what we studied in Information Systems I/II and I'm only 32 years old... nice college education there). The language itself is actually pretty cool. I enjoyed working in it and learning legacy stuff; it made me appreciate what we do have now. The work of maintenance on old systems is just annoying and boring. That's all you generally do. Few people are rolling out new things in COBOL even on older systems. It's just maintenance, debugging, and providing support for new features when the domain you are working on requires it.
    • lgieron 11y ago
      Doesn't sound too far off from many Java jobs.
      • icelancer 11y ago
        Hmm. Yeah, I guess you are right. :)
      • danieltillett 11y ago
        Isn’t Java the 21st C. answer to Cobol?