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Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on?

234 points _false | 2 comments | 18 Jul 25 13:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

COBOL legacy systems in finance and government are somewhat of a meme. However, I've never actually met a single person who's day job is to maintain one. I'd be curious to learn what systems are you working on?
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mjl- ◴[18 Jul 25 13:37 UTC] No.44604512[source]▶
What I'm wondering: Are the salaries high? Not just because you've been employed at the job for a long time with regular raises, but because it's hard to find developers.
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ecshafer ◴[18 Jul 25 13:43 UTC] No.44604569[source]▶
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.

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1. SL61 ◴[18 Jul 25 15:01 UTC] No.44605419[source]▶
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.
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2. ecshafer ◴[18 Jul 25 15:35 UTC] No.44605880[source]▶
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.