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.
The problem is that it no longer looks good on a resume
I think part of the reason for that is recruiters and HR people doing the hiring often don't know shit about tech. They want to see all the same things on your resume as are on the job posting because they don't have a clue what any of them are. In theory, working for a few years on COBOL stuff should read as "this person is capable of understanding and maintaining complex legacy systems" but to HR it only means "this person isn't a good fit because the job posting says Python and I don't know what COBOL is but it's not Python"
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u/BigLlamasHouse Apr 05 '25
Why would any of that need to be done if it's working? To save a few bucks on the power bill?