Comment by ecshafer
4 days ago
No the salaries aren't high. They are typically lower than other software engineer salaries. There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough.
The very high salaries you hear about sometimes are always for VERY specific mainframes that are extremely old with a lot of quirks, and are usually being paid to consultants.
> There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough.
Seeing the horrible performance from Indian offshore firms with modern languages I cannot imagine the mess they make with legacy languages like Cobol. Or is it the other way around?
Corps operate despite inefficiency not because of efficiency. LLC protection and market control are everything.
But the code still has to work. LLC's and other corporate structures only protect the owners if the company goes bankrupt, which it will if its systems stop working.
Ditto with market control, it's not some permanent crown you achieve. Companies have to keep performing to keep their market share.
E.g., if you opened an account at a major bank, and your transactions started failing, would you keep banking there?
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A while back I came across job listings for a COBOL consultancy near me that only seems to hire fresh grads for well below market rate (not much higher than retail/restaurant jobs - this is in a cheaper part of the US). They promised to train their employees from the ground up and implied that COBOL knowledge would set them up for a really profitable career. It seems like they were taking advantage of the common advice: "just become a COBOL developer, it pays well because nobody wants to use COBOL!" But I'm skeptical that someone coming out of that consultancy with 2 or 3 years of experience in nothing but COBOL would do well on the job market.
The places I know that use (or used cobol 5 years ago) were all in hiring freezes for cobol developers and were trying to get off of it as much as they could (no new development, only maintenance, etc). I don't think its a surefire bet.