The problem isn't COBOL developers, it's the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of the applications themselves - developers don't know why something was built the wa

The problem isn't COBOL developers, it's the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of the applications themselves - developers don't know why something was built the way it was, so maintaining and upgrading it is difficult from a logical perspective, not a technical one. When you provision a credit or debit card to an iPhone, it hits thousands of lines of COBOL for my bank. I wrote the application that delegates requests that come in on the payment network from Apple. Our issue isn't finding developers to maintain it, but if the application sits stagnant for decades, then the problem exists that we don't have product expertise to do the work.