Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

The flawed "economic analysis" in this article is so commonly brought out, but at this point we should just call it what it is: lying.

There is no "shortage of COBOL programmers." Businesses are simply choosing what they will pay, and the market is responding appropriately. And this is also not just a case of naively shouting "duh, just pay them more" for a market that can't bear the increase in costs (i.e. some industries can only survive if there are available low cost workers - most of us aren't willing to pay $40 for a fast food burger, for example. Whether those industries should be around if they can only survive on low cost labor is another story...) It's not exactly like the financial world is scrounging for money. Businesses can either choose to pay their CEOs a hundred million or so, or they can choose to spread some of that money to COBOL programmers. The choice is theirs, but there is no "shortage".

I agree with you on the myth of "a shortage", and respect your strongly pro-market argument. Therefore "some industries can only survive if there are available low cost workers" suggests to me that those industries should simply die. Let more efficient industries that return more value to people thrive in their place?

It makes more sense to invest 100m $ in AI assistant for a year and then pay the CEO 120m/year the next one after firing the rest of the COBOL devs.

I cut my teeth on financial COBOL back in the 90s and from my perspective the article isn't "lying", it's "completely divorced from reality". For the past three decades it's been cheaper to encapsulate these systems and extend functionality by working in a modern language, and so that's what everyone's been doing.

The prime issue (imho) is that it's less expensive and better for everyone if you rewrite these systems from scratch, but that cost is still so prohibitive that it might not make sense to keep operating the company.

The second issue is hardware availability, a bizarre omission on the author's part. Your org lifespan might entirely, predictably depend on how many spares a forward-thinking dev bought in the 70's.

The third issue is fintech. Someone else has already raised the cash needed to rewrite from scratch, and what you can do about it is sell them your client list.

From a personal perspective COBOL is such a pain in the ass to work with that I'd need a ruinous salary to be enthusiastic about the job.