Cobol Job Market Heating Up

snydeq writes "Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren't going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today."

Comments

Short supply?

[dedazo]

I'd disagree with that. Schools in India are still providing lots of people with mainframe skills. The whole shebang, like InfoMan, CICS, etc. Not just Cobol. At least that's my impression. I see a lot of people from Tata, InfoSys and IBM Global Services doing mainframe-centric maintenance and even new development at companies I have contact with these days.

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[dedazo]

$90? You're selling yourself cheap. Try somewhere around $120, for starters. It goes up from there. And these are rates for long-term projects, not wham/bam/thankyou/ma'am two week gigs to solve some obscure CICS problem.

That's assuming you have the resume and enough systems experience to back it up, but most people who do COBOL for a living do anyway.

In the mid-00s I seriously considered learning COBOL and C mainframe development after seeing how much those old farts from IBM were pulling in. It's far from sexy, but it's a lot of cash.