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My wife stopped applying for jobs involving government programs involving COBOL several years ago. She is very fluent in a lot of languages including COBOL, FOR

My wife stopped applying for jobs involving government programs involving COBOL several years ago. She is very fluent in a lot of languages including COBOL, FORTRAN and so on. The issue is that these agencies never want to pay real wages for a very narrow skillset. The last one told her that their entire budget for the system rewrite was less than $100k and they were expecting to hire 4 programmers to get the job done because the consultant they had hired told them that it needed 4 programmers.

Guest42 6y ago
Same, I’ve seen postings for Fortune 500 cobol principal engineers paying 130k wanting 10+ years of domain specific experience
- rhizome 6y ago
  Funnily enough, from a few years ago until about a month ago, 130K was the bottom salary to avoid having to prove that an H1B hire didn't take a US worker's job. Or something along those lines. Point being, it was a statutory number. Perhaps coincidentally in your example, but... https://www.quora.com/Does-the-new-H1B-130K-salary-requirement-bill-also-impact-non-IT-jobs https://www.quora.com/Does-the-new-H1B-130K-salary-requireme...
  - Guest42 6y ago
    That explains it. I’d say given the difficulty, importance, and rarity of the skill set the pay should be quite a bit higher.
dmix 6y ago
There’s always Go or Ruby or Elixir (and the usual bucket of Java and c etc) whatever paying way more at startups and big companies. I see hitting wrong with hiring some Latvians. They have competent programmers. Those wages would have gone up if the Latvians didn’t figure out this niche existed. So many developing countries have and incredible about of opportunity in front of them just copying what the US did and our pays lots for. If I was born in any of them I’d look around at what the developed countries had that works without the usual awful gov meddling and do a top end offering of it for my country. The great thing about programming is you can really think of anything and just do it (like wise with entrepreneurship). If you want to make money either exploit existing obvious underserved markets or build a new one with actual value creation people pay for. The suckers in developing countries sit around waiting for their gov to figure everything out for them. They’ll be waiting their whole life until gov agencies catch on to value creation opportunities. It’s always those who go out to look for it. Small businesses and whatnot used to be the for new immigrants to North America and largely is. But too much of the existing population forgot that and blame the past generations or gov or their culture pushing useless degrees instead of going out and trying to find opportunities themselves.
the_only_law 6y ago
I used to work for a “poorer” state a while back and made a wage lower than most people here could possibly imagine. The stereotypes about good benefits were also rather overrated. Pay bands were bureaucratic and raises (even minor CoL ones) were rare. And ofc, there was literal politics invovled. Outside that, the job itself wasn’t particularly worse than an average corporate gig.
hugey010 6y ago
You are right, the pay is insanely low for the complexity of the task being asked. In my experience, state governments are quickly warming up to paying for this kind of specific help. Although, most plans involve sunsetting the system for modern standards, so it isn't exactly a permanent gig.

Guest42 6y ago

Same, I’ve seen postings for Fortune 500 cobol principal engineers paying 130k wanting 10+ years of domain specific experience

rhizome 6y ago
Funnily enough, from a few years ago until about a month ago, 130K was the bottom salary to avoid having to prove that an H1B hire didn't take a US worker's job. Or something along those lines. Point being, it was a statutory number. Perhaps coincidentally in your example, but... https://www.quora.com/Does-the-new-H1B-130K-salary-requirement-bill-also-impact-non-IT-jobs https://www.quora.com/Does-the-new-H1B-130K-salary-requireme...
- Guest42 6y ago
  That explains it. I’d say given the difficulty, importance, and rarity of the skill set the pay should be quite a bit higher.

dmix 6y ago

There’s always Go or Ruby or Elixir (and the usual bucket of Java and c etc) whatever paying way more at startups and big companies. I see hitting wrong with hiring some Latvians. They have competent programmers. Those wages would have gone up if the Latvians didn’t figure out this niche existed. So many developing countries have and incredible about of opportunity in front of them just copying what the US did and our pays lots for. If I was born in any of them I’d look around at what the developed countries had that works without the usual awful gov meddling and do a top end offering of it for my country. The great thing about programming is you can really think of anything and just do it (like wise with entrepreneurship). If you want to make money either exploit existing obvious underserved markets or build a new one with actual value creation people pay for. The suckers in developing countries sit around waiting for their gov to figure everything out for them. They’ll be waiting their whole life until gov agencies catch on to value creation opportunities. It’s always those who go out to look for it. Small businesses and whatnot used to be the for new immigrants to North America and largely is. But too much of the existing population forgot that and blame the past generations or gov or their culture pushing useless degrees instead of going out and trying to find opportunities themselves.

the_only_law 6y ago

I used to work for a “poorer” state a while back and made a wage lower than most people here could possibly imagine. The stereotypes about good benefits were also rather overrated. Pay bands were bureaucratic and raises (even minor CoL ones) were rare. And ofc, there was literal politics invovled. Outside that, the job itself wasn’t particularly worse than an average corporate gig.

hugey010 6y ago

You are right, the pay is insanely low for the complexity of the task being asked. In my experience, state governments are quickly warming up to paying for this kind of specific help. Although, most plans involve sunsetting the system for modern standards, so it isn't exactly a permanent gig.