7 ms·

I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common th

I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common those legacy code bases are.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Right. This is a "shortage of Lamborghinis... at the $10,000 price point."
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  There is a "shortage of housing in SF ... for $100,000."
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    If the going rate for COBOL programmers was towards the top of the Software Engineer market, that would be an apt comparison. Trouble is, the going rate for COBOL programmers is at the bottom of the Software Engineer payscale.
    - smnrchrds 5y ago
      The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. Even the fact that prices are consistently increasing doesn't mean that there is a labour shortage. It's only a shortage if you cannot buy labour at any price. It is not what you specifically are arguing here, but I have read different iterations of the above dozens of times on HN and it is always highly upvoted and almost all comments are in support of this position. I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        But surely there is a shortage, and you can't just pay more. My mom knew COBOL. She retired in the 1970s. You're going to have a tough time hiring her now.
        codebolt 5y ago
        I've never written a line of COBOL, but pay me enough money, and I'll be up and running in a mainframe terminal by the end of the month.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        Looking at in.indeed.com, you can make ₹10,00,000 or more per year. Up to as much as ₹25,00,000. ...but that's if you have "3-5 years of Experience in Cobol, IMS, DB2, JCL". I imagine an entry-level job might pay ₹7,00,000 or so, if you can show sufficient coursework in COBOL?
        tdeck 5y ago
        Some quick googling shows that ₹10,00,000 is about $13,560 USD. edit: I made the mistake of multiplying this by 12 originally since I didn't read carefully.
        yunohn 5y ago
        The commenter specifically said that the Indian salaries are per year. So they definitely underpay even for the Indian market, given salaries for non-COBOL.
        tdeck 5y ago
        You're right, not sure how I missed that.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        One might ask, setting aside the task of getting accurate and representative numbers, because that's too much work, what do Indians believe is plausible? Some people are surely trying to set expectations low, while others may be exaggerating what you can make with a few years of experience. However, I've seen quite a few different sources claim an entry level developer makes around 4-10 lakh rupees a year. This makes me think they think their audience considers that good but not unbelievable. And then when somebody claims you can make 60 lakh or more with 5 years experience, it makes me think that their audience knows roughly what US salaries are, whether or not the figure is realistic.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        >The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. I guess I'm on that side, for the following reasons - the companies that want Cobol are companies that are pretty rich. Yet, Cobol salaries are on the low end for Software developers. >I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF. there's no housing shortage in SF for billionaires who are willing to pay whatever is asked. Did I mention my perception that the companies who want Cobol programmers are really rich. Now, it may be that there is an actual Cobol shortage, I would even agree that it is likely because at the rate offered not very many people would be interested in learning a language generally derided and not much like other languages. But we cannot know that there is an actual Cobol shortage when the rates offered are less than those for Machine Learning experts. If you offer top rates for Cobol programmers and can't get them, then you have a shortage.
        tored 5y ago
        Many governments use COBOL too, governments are theoretically rich, but they also have many holes to fill.
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        good point, I don't have a good metric for weighing how much government benefits would increase the value therefore it might be that there is enough money on the table for gov employees that there can be said to be a shortage.
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        There is a sense in which you only get a shortage as a result of something like price controls. If Saudi Arabia stops producing oil, the price goes up, but you can still get it. But if the government institutes price controls then people buy all they like at that price until the supply runs out. Then you can't buy it at all because nobody who has it wants to sell it for less than the price cap and nobody is allowed to sell it for more. There is another definition of a shortage which basically says that supply doesn't respond to price, i.e. even if people are willing to pay more, the total amount of supply doesn't increase. If gasoline was suddenly $50/gallon, it wouldn't stay there very long because it would immediately be profitable for new supply to come online, using production methods that aren't economical at lower prices. Supply would increase in response to higher prices. This is also true of COBOL developers. If they were highly paid (relative to other software developers) then more people would learn COBOL and the supply of COBOL developers would increase in response to the high price. It isn't really true of housing in SF. The price goes up and the supply remains the same because new construction is constrained by zoning. So there's a shortage.
      - q-big 5y ago
        > The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. The problem with this argument (as a native German speaker) is that in German, there do exist two different concepts that are both translated with "shortage" in English: - [die] Knappheit - [der] Mangel "Knappheit" is a sign of an efficient market: if the supply decreases or the demand increases, the prices go up, so only the buyers that are willing to pay most get their share. This makes a market efficient. "Mangel", on the other hand, means that (nearly) no matter how much you are willing to pay, you cannot get the good. This is a strong sign that the market is broken (often because of regulations). Of course the media in its agenda loves to confuse these two concepts and writes of "Fachkräftemangel" ("shortage of professionals"; even though "Fachkraft" which I translate with "professional" here, actually literally means "field [field of study] force"), hiding the fact that there are no signs of Mangel, but of Knappheit.
  - lmm 5y ago
    If coding salaries get higher, more people go into coding. (We're actually seeing that happen already). Whereas it's de facto illegal to build homes in SF.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I thought I read somewhere that there are schools in India teaching COBOL more recently. So I wonder if it's something like manufacturing in China - it's not just cheaper, it's that the expertise has moved. You can't incentivize American programmers with a lot of experience by throwing money at them, when they retired ~50 years ago. I signed up for a COBOL course at a state university around 2000, but dropped it without ever attending a class. I think they still had line printers. At one point I was amused that there seemed to be a standard for object oriented COBOL...
  - tdeck 5y ago
    It's my understanding that many of the Indian body shops like Tata and Infosys do COBOL work. When I was an intern at Adobe, one of the other interns was Indian and had spent the last summer writing COBOL at Infosys. He was glad not to be doing that anymore, and I suspect engineers in India are looking to learn better-compensated skills just as in the U.S.
the_only_law 5y ago
I’ve always been told it’s an incredibly bimodal area. You have the guys the company can snag at $60k a year while their career stagnates and they become stuck and then consultants who worked with these systems way back in the day, may even be retired, but can charge insane consulting rates.
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> ...relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, Someone writing COBOL for one such critical systems told me that there are two testers in their company whom they have never met and that no real testing happens(just some basic code review) because their company charges the client every time a bug is found to fix them. But they did say that their client do call their retired employees to clarify some doubts just like this often shared article states.
BizarroLand 5y ago
And aside from that, who wakes up one day and decides to spend their lives wallowing in a dying programming language to work in the illustrious field of maintaining 30 year old banking systems as an underpaid code monkey whose skills are largely nontransferable to other sections of the information technology industry?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common those legacy code bases are.

jjoonathan 5y ago

Right. This is a "shortage of Lamborghinis... at the $10,000 price point."

smnrchrds 5y ago
There is a "shortage of housing in SF ... for $100,000."
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  If the going rate for COBOL programmers was towards the top of the Software Engineer market, that would be an apt comparison. Trouble is, the going rate for COBOL programmers is at the bottom of the Software Engineer payscale.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. Even the fact that prices are consistently increasing doesn't mean that there is a labour shortage. It's only a shortage if you cannot buy labour at any price. It is not what you specifically are arguing here, but I have read different iterations of the above dozens of times on HN and it is always highly upvoted and almost all comments are in support of this position. I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      But surely there is a shortage, and you can't just pay more. My mom knew COBOL. She retired in the 1970s. You're going to have a tough time hiring her now.
      - codebolt 5y ago
        I've never written a line of COBOL, but pay me enough money, and I'll be up and running in a mainframe terminal by the end of the month.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        Looking at in.indeed.com, you can make ₹10,00,000 or more per year. Up to as much as ₹25,00,000. ...but that's if you have "3-5 years of Experience in Cobol, IMS, DB2, JCL". I imagine an entry-level job might pay ₹7,00,000 or so, if you can show sufficient coursework in COBOL?
        tdeck 5y ago
        Some quick googling shows that ₹10,00,000 is about $13,560 USD. edit: I made the mistake of multiplying this by 12 originally since I didn't read carefully.
        yunohn 5y ago
        The commenter specifically said that the Indian salaries are per year. So they definitely underpay even for the Indian market, given salaries for non-COBOL.
        tdeck 5y ago
        You're right, not sure how I missed that.
        perl4ever 5y ago
        One might ask, setting aside the task of getting accurate and representative numbers, because that's too much work, what do Indians believe is plausible? Some people are surely trying to set expectations low, while others may be exaggerating what you can make with a few years of experience. However, I've seen quite a few different sources claim an entry level developer makes around 4-10 lakh rupees a year. This makes me think they think their audience considers that good but not unbelievable. And then when somebody claims you can make 60 lakh or more with 5 years experience, it makes me think that their audience knows roughly what US salaries are, whether or not the figure is realistic.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      >The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. I guess I'm on that side, for the following reasons - the companies that want Cobol are companies that are pretty rich. Yet, Cobol salaries are on the low end for Software developers. >I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF. there's no housing shortage in SF for billionaires who are willing to pay whatever is asked. Did I mention my perception that the companies who want Cobol programmers are really rich. Now, it may be that there is an actual Cobol shortage, I would even agree that it is likely because at the rate offered not very many people would be interested in learning a language generally derided and not much like other languages. But we cannot know that there is an actual Cobol shortage when the rates offered are less than those for Machine Learning experts. If you offer top rates for Cobol programmers and can't get them, then you have a shortage.
      - tored 5y ago
        Many governments use COBOL too, governments are theoretically rich, but they also have many holes to fill.
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        good point, I don't have a good metric for weighing how much government benefits would increase the value therefore it might be that there is enough money on the table for gov employees that there can be said to be a shortage.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      There is a sense in which you only get a shortage as a result of something like price controls. If Saudi Arabia stops producing oil, the price goes up, but you can still get it. But if the government institutes price controls then people buy all they like at that price until the supply runs out. Then you can't buy it at all because nobody who has it wants to sell it for less than the price cap and nobody is allowed to sell it for more. There is another definition of a shortage which basically says that supply doesn't respond to price, i.e. even if people are willing to pay more, the total amount of supply doesn't increase. If gasoline was suddenly $50/gallon, it wouldn't stay there very long because it would immediately be profitable for new supply to come online, using production methods that aren't economical at lower prices. Supply would increase in response to higher prices. This is also true of COBOL developers. If they were highly paid (relative to other software developers) then more people would learn COBOL and the supply of COBOL developers would increase in response to the high price. It isn't really true of housing in SF. The price goes up and the supply remains the same because new construction is constrained by zoning. So there's a shortage.
    - q-big 5y ago
      > The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. The problem with this argument (as a native German speaker) is that in German, there do exist two different concepts that are both translated with "shortage" in English: - [die] Knappheit - [der] Mangel "Knappheit" is a sign of an efficient market: if the supply decreases or the demand increases, the prices go up, so only the buyers that are willing to pay most get their share. This makes a market efficient. "Mangel", on the other hand, means that (nearly) no matter how much you are willing to pay, you cannot get the good. This is a strong sign that the market is broken (often because of regulations). Of course the media in its agenda loves to confuse these two concepts and writes of "Fachkräftemangel" ("shortage of professionals"; even though "Fachkraft" which I translate with "professional" here, actually literally means "field [field of study] force"), hiding the fact that there are no signs of Mangel, but of Knappheit.
- lmm 5y ago
  If coding salaries get higher, more people go into coding. (We're actually seeing that happen already). Whereas it's de facto illegal to build homes in SF.
perl4ever 5y ago
I thought I read somewhere that there are schools in India teaching COBOL more recently. So I wonder if it's something like manufacturing in China - it's not just cheaper, it's that the expertise has moved. You can't incentivize American programmers with a lot of experience by throwing money at them, when they retired ~50 years ago. I signed up for a COBOL course at a state university around 2000, but dropped it without ever attending a class. I think they still had line printers. At one point I was amused that there seemed to be a standard for object oriented COBOL...
- tdeck 5y ago
  It's my understanding that many of the Indian body shops like Tata and Infosys do COBOL work. When I was an intern at Adobe, one of the other interns was Indian and had spent the last summer writing COBOL at Infosys. He was glad not to be doing that anymore, and I suspect engineers in India are looking to learn better-compensated skills just as in the U.S.

the_only_law 5y ago

I’ve always been told it’s an incredibly bimodal area. You have the guys the company can snag at $60k a year while their career stagnates and they become stuck and then consultants who worked with these systems way back in the day, may even be retired, but can charge insane consulting rates.

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> ...relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, Someone writing COBOL for one such critical systems told me that there are two testers in their company whom they have never met and that no real testing happens(just some basic code review) because their company charges the client every time a bug is found to fix them. But they did say that their client do call their retired employees to clarify some doubts just like this often shared article states.

BizarroLand 5y ago

And aside from that, who wakes up one day and decides to spend their lives wallowing in a dying programming language to work in the illustrious field of maintaining 30 year old banking systems as an underpaid code monkey whose skills are largely nontransferable to other sections of the information technology industry?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]