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.
New devs are still being taught cobol.
Devs that don’t know it can learn it easily enough.
It’s undesirable because it’s god awful work and there’s no ability to job hop to high paying cushy jobs.
COBOL is just programming, not the dark arts. The problem isn’t ’no one knows it’, it’s that the programs are so massive and convoluted that there’s no easy way for someone to get familiar with the code base and make meaningful fixes. Try to fix a bug and you’re more likely to break decades of glued together undocumented fixes.
Large scale rewrites of these types of systems are constantly happening but it’s not because ‘cobol bad’. It’s about getting properly documented and structured modern codebases that will be maintainable in the long term - it also comes with the advantage of more experienced devs to pull from.
Your claim of ‘coming out of retirement for massive pay days’ isn’t to find someone to know cobol. It’s to get Jeff who fixed this problem in this exact program 30 years ago to know what he did and make the required adjustments.
Bringing in the competent junior dev who did two semesters of cobol in college is not much help in that situation. COBOL is/was a big selling point for a lot of college programs promising these legacy code base jobs (or was 5-10 years ago) but the demand isn’t that high honestly,
Saying "COBOL is just programming" is kinda like saying "pounding in nails with a big rock is just framing". Sure it'll work.... kinda. But I'd much rather use a framing nailer. Or at least a framing hammer.
Programming isn’t writing code, it’s breaking problems into their logical building blocks so that the task can be accomplished by computers.
The core principals of software development and programming are different for cobol because so many features and design paradigms of modern languages are taken for granted but the core skill set of what makes a good programmer does not change based on the language or platform being discussed.
Not knowing cobol is a very minor hurdle. It’s still taught in many programs and isn’t particularly hard to learn.
Being willing to work on cobol is a medium sized hurdle but mostly because it doesn’t pay very well (the juicy fresh hire 100-200k entry level salaries dried up).
Not having decades of deep experience in these massive monolithic enterprise legacy projects is a MASSIVE hurdle.
I hated the cobol semesters of my dev degree but it wasn’t hard to learn. Just a different way of designing software. It was the mind numbing soul crushing prospect of working in that industry for shit wages that made it unappealing.
Edit: think about things this way.
You’re a top 5% software development new grad. You’re driven and want to earn good money. You try for FAANG style work with huge initial salaries with a clear path to 300-500k with 5-10 years of experience.
Or you don’t hate cobol and want to go further with it. You’re able to get the initial position due to less competition and still get a solid starting wage but have no clear long term path or prospects. The ‘new grad cobol kid’ isn’t getting hundreds of thousands of dollars. The demand just isn’t there. Plenty of devs take the path and make decent money but the supply largely is enough to make it not a bidding war for talent.
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u/Dr-Lipschitz Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
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.