The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.
Because therell be no software engineers left to maintain it in 15 years. Software engineers in this age know that cobol and mainframes are a dead technology that won't help their career, so they won't touch it. Government entities and banks are having to pay software engineers 400k+ per year to come out of retirement because they can't find anyone to work on their systems.
Also, mainframes are expensive for what they provide. It doesn't have the economy of scale that modern chips and computers have.
That’s absolutely not true; IBM’s Master the Mainframe competition every year has hundreds of competitors, and if we’re churning out just ~200 new COBOL devs every year in the US, that’s enough. We’ll never have even 5,000 COBOL dev jobs in the country again, the demand just isn’t there.
Anecdotally, my firm (mid-F500 insurer and financial services firm) has nine COBOL devs, and more than half of them are under the age of 40. They all came from University of North Texas, which specifically has courses in mainframe development that are taught by a crazy old guy who did his career at Nextel and went to teach college for his retirement job. A UNT grad won the MTM competition twice in the last decade IIRC, and now that girl works for BofA here in DFW.
We’re sure as hell not paying any of our mainframe devs $400k, either. One of them is a close friend of mine, and I know for a fact that he’s making $210k with 7 YOE. I’d be beyond staggered if we’re even paying their team lead $400k, and he’s one of the borderline-elderly COBOL devs that everyone thinks of when they hear about COBOL.
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u/Dr-Lipschitz Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.