> COBOL jobs are not particularly well-paying, and there are young people learning it, and no, they don't get awesome paychecks.
Yup. All the articles on the shortage of COBOL programmers is actually companies whining that they can't find cheap labor. If they paid well, they'd have their pick of young and old.
> All the articles on the shortage of COBOL programmers is actually companies whining that they can’t find cheap labor.
The word “COBOL” isn’t necessary in that sentence.
And, for that matter, “programmers” could be replaced with any skilled work field for which such complaints exist.
An actual shortage of labor (where the demand curve is above the supply curve at all price points) is theoretically possible, but in the real world nearly 100% of complaints about labor shortages are really complaints that the intersection of the supply an demand curves are at a point that results in purchasers of labor making less profit from whatever they are buying that labor for than they’d like, and laborers making more than those employers would like.
And "companies" could be replaced by "people" and "labor" could be replaced by "stuff"...
The case of COBOL is of interest as there was a wave of articles this year suggesting there was some sort of anomaly on the market: tons of COBOL programs and not a soul alive to maintain them.
> The case of COBOL is of interest as there was a wave of articles this year suggesting there was some sort of anomaly on the market: tons of COBOL programs and not a soul alive to maintain them.
There’s probably something more like a legitimate short-term shortage in that case, because you have lots of immediate demand for changes (because of urgent business process changes) to stale legacy systems, so you really don’t have the luxury of waiting on long-term corrective mechanisms like retraining, price signalling through the pipeline for workforce entrants, etc., before the value opportunity is missed. COVID-19 and the resulting (many probably short-term) legal and business changes created a number of market anomalies of that kind.
Do note this kind of wave of articles is recurrent, is not tied in general to COVID-19 (might be in the current situation, but I've seen it at least once or twice a year), and has been almost always false. "False" in the sense that no, learning COBOL is not such a great career choice to enter a life of wealth and untapped riches.
If they paid well enough, your average working programmer would flip to COBOL for a pay raise. Once you've learned a few languages, you can solve problems in any language. It's just about having the manual and maybe an overview of available facilities so you don't have to read all the docs upfront. The syntax doesn't matter for data plumbing applications. COBOL is as good as BASIC as good as Java as good as Python etc. You might prefer writing Python (or Haskell, Clojure, Rust, C++, Go, Scala, Kotlin, whatever is en-vogue these days) because it is more concise, but if you can effectively hack in one language you can do it in COBOL too with a little effort.
I'd happily take a COBOL job for $250k + benefits and a 3% annual raise. That's hardly a crazy salary either. It's still a substantial discount over what a lot of technology companies pay, and likely inline with what most mid-level managers at banks and insurance companies earn already.
But COBOL jobs don't pay anywhere near that kind of coin, and they likely never will in my lifetime. The systems in place are solid enough that they can survive the resolving door of shitty, underpaid contractors who are hired to work on them. Nothing every improves, but it also never gets worse.
Same here. Working with a crappier language in return for retiring earlier is an acceptable trade off for me. Even if after a decade of working in COBOL I became unable to find another IT job, I wouldn't care, because I'd be already happily early retired.
Out of curiosity I just made a short search for COBOL jobs in my area. The few I found actually pay less than my current Java job.
"these days"?? COBOL has been available on Windows since Windows 3.1, and was even a commercial success on DOS in pre-Windows days. Yes, it was principally used in finance on mainframes, but the mini- and micro-computer implementations were fully ANSI standard, and included extensions for CICS and other mainframe stuff.
(I worked on DOS COBOL runtime support, then OS/2, then Windows ...)
Yup. All the articles on the shortage of COBOL programmers is actually companies whining that they can't find cheap labor. If they paid well, they'd have their pick of young and old.