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

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127 points Anon84 | 1 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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buro9 ◴[03 Dec 23 18:12 UTC] No.38509304[source]▶
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/cobol-programmer-salary...

If it's so valuable to the industry that they have good people who know it, that should surely be reflected in the salary / comp for roles... And if that were high, people would learn it, but it's not high, it's arguably worse than just learning a little JavaScript

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halfdan ◴[03 Dec 23 19:26 UTC] No.38509917[source]▶
You’re looking at salaries for COBOL programmers in the UK which is a small subset of an already small market.
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IshKebab ◴[03 Dec 23 19:34 UTC] No.38509985[source]▶
I've checked in America before and came to the same conclusion. There's an idea that COBOL programming pays vastly more than other languages, but it's just a myth. It might pay a little more, but more like 20% more. Certainly not enough to warrant a COBOL career.

And I'm sure some consultants can earn vast sums fixing old COBOL code, but that's just because they're consultants. Consultants always earn vast sums.

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1. cowsandmilk ◴[04 Dec 23 00:21 UTC] No.38512258[source]▶
> Certainly not enough to warrant a COBOL career.

I don't understand why people are claiming this sets your career to only ever write COBOL. I know plenty of people who started their careers with perl, but have been Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, or Rust programmers at different points as their careers progressed.

Someone overseeing a project migrating a COBOL monolith over time to a set of decoupled services in some other language would easily have a strong story for the timeless need of improving application architecture.