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Frankly, I was shocked at how low COBOL salaries tend to be. I want extra money to code in a terrible language maintaining your bloating, ancient codebase. The

by hajile 4y ago

Frankly, I was shocked at how low COBOL salaries tend to be. I want extra money to code in a terrible language maintaining your bloating, ancient codebase. They believe that all of this should mean LESS salary. Meanwhile, old COBOL devs are retiring in droves and the businesses stuck on COBOL have countless billions riding on those systems. Why hasn't supply/demand kicked in yet?

anonylizard 4y ago
Because COBOL is not difficult to learn, in fact it was designed so that 'businesspeople' could easily learn it (Which didn't happen). COBOL is merely undesirable from a long term career perspective. The aggregate demand is also very small. Therefore India's big IT shops can simply train some fresh grads to learn COBOL. Those grads don't care about working on the latest tech, they just want a well paid and stable job. This puts a hard ceiling on the wages of COBOL programmers.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah. One of the biggest "myths" around computing is that non-technical people will want to do any form of coding (and yes, I'm talking about BDD as well) The only development environment they know (barely) is Excel
- zozbot234 4y ago
  COBOL may not be all that difficult to learn, but the proprietary systems and environments that a legacy COBOL program will be designed to interact with are a different story. These are often extremely obscure.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
those same businesses are run by tech executives who haven’t written a line of code in 20 years it’s all about saying no to raises, controlling people to work with their butts in a chair in an office, 8am meetings, 10 different teams to do basic things, 5 people per project whose sole job is to say “no we can’t do that”, lots of 2am batch processing on call not sure if supply/demand works for 40k employee companies
citrin_ru 4y ago
From what I see on the Internet usage of COBOL correlates with under-investment. It may happen even in a multi-billion company which considers software a cost center and tries to minimize 'waste' of money by not paying developers market rate salaries.

by hajile 4y ago

anonylizard 4y ago

Because COBOL is not difficult to learn, in fact it was designed so that 'businesspeople' could easily learn it (Which didn't happen). COBOL is merely undesirable from a long term career perspective. The aggregate demand is also very small. Therefore India's big IT shops can simply train some fresh grads to learn COBOL. Those grads don't care about working on the latest tech, they just want a well paid and stable job. This puts a hard ceiling on the wages of COBOL programmers.

raverbashing 4y ago
Yeah. One of the biggest "myths" around computing is that non-technical people will want to do any form of coding (and yes, I'm talking about BDD as well) The only development environment they know (barely) is Excel
zozbot234 4y ago
COBOL may not be all that difficult to learn, but the proprietary systems and environments that a legacy COBOL program will be designed to interact with are a different story. These are often extremely obscure.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

those same businesses are run by tech executives who haven’t written a line of code in 20 years it’s all about saying no to raises, controlling people to work with their butts in a chair in an office, 8am meetings, 10 different teams to do basic things, 5 people per project whose sole job is to say “no we can’t do that”, lots of 2am batch processing on call not sure if supply/demand works for 40k employee companies

citrin_ru 4y ago

From what I see on the Internet usage of COBOL correlates with under-investment. It may happen even in a multi-billion company which considers software a cost center and tries to minimize 'waste' of money by not paying developers market rate salaries.