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I learned COBOL only to find the real reason the engineers get paid so much to maintain systems is not really due to their rarity but rather their extensive dec

• akokanka 3y ago
  It's not just Cobol that gets moved to India almost all dev is being moved there. When you get decent Devs for 45 buck's a day, there's no need in others.
  • michaelmrose 3y ago
    This is mathematically untrue as ought to be obvious by the mere fact that other devs exist. There are more work needing good devs than good devs in the world let alone just India thus even expensive labor finds a market.
    • heywhatupboys 3y ago
      This is cope. It is clear that software engineering in the high-paying West is moving out to India, Eastern Europe, Latin America. The days of the irreplacable, highly paid software engineer who does the bare minimum are over
      • michaelmrose 3y ago
        Why is there year on year more software developers in the US? When manufacturing jobs moved to China we didn't see manufacturing jobs increasing simultaneously in both markets. You invoke emotionalal thinking while my statements are purely factual. Show me your numbers.
        • o1y32 3y ago
          More software developers in the US does not exclude the possibility that there are also more developers in India, actually even more than in the US. My company has a presence in India, and it is noticeable that the company in general is favoring hiring in the India -- entire teams gets built in India, and headcounts are first given to Indian teams and then US teams
          • xwdv 3y ago
            Sure, and now entire teams are being replaced by ChatGPT. My advice to American and Indian students: don’t bother studying computer science or getting into software engineering.
            • winrid 3y ago
              Odd advice. You could do far worse in terms of degrees...
              • xwdv 3y ago
                No, don’t bother. Go into medicine or mechanics or something similarly high paying but without threat of outsourcing or AI replacement.
                • winrid 3y ago
                  So we should only tell people in India to learn software engineering? Like how we moved all our factories to China? I'm sure this will all go super well.
            • michaelmrose 3y ago
              Nobody replaces whole teams with ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't exactly work alone. They at best replace larger teams with smaller teams with better tools. More realistically the same size teams can now accomplish more. If I can date myself the person gluing chatGPT code, their own code, and the company codebase will be Dilbert not the pointy haired boss.
          • 3y ago
      • sgt101 3y ago
        For the last 30 years every dev job that could be offshored has been offshored. Now there is an issue; the salaries in India have not caught up - but they have come up a lot. The infrastructures in India bit a lot of people hard in the arse over covid and a lot of credit was lost there. Also political issues are looming large for people doing offshoring. You might have been very optimistic about the dev shop you've opened in the Ukraine, but that was then. It's still a true observation. I have never ever worked in a company that has had enough onshore devs to do the work that is urgent and of high value. Never. When that changes I'll be concerned about software salaries.
  • declan_roberts 3y ago
    Any “decent” dev in India will simply take the H1B train to America if they’re being paid $45 a day.
    • o1y32 3y ago
      You might want to look up how increasingly complicated it is to "take the H1B train". There is a lottery process where one has <10% of chance of getting selected in the "general" category. And many companies don't actually have this process of sending you directly to US -- you need to spend years to get a degree from a US institution and find a job just like people from other countries. It is nothing "simple". Do your research.
• LapsangGuzzler 3y ago
  Yep, average COBOL salaries don’t touch modern SWE salaries. The crazy money is limited to a few expert consultants as you point out. > A lot of new COBOL work just gets shipped off to India to be done cheaply. This is becoming less true for the reason I mentioned above: the pay is much higher for modern languages and tools, which means that the big Indian contracting firms are now training Java/AWS platform devs instead of COBOL. This is creating a growing shortage of COBOL talent that is beginning to impact onshore COBOL dev shops.
• deleted 3y ago
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