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

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[truthsearch]

A company can spend a few million dollars rewriting and thoroughly testing a replacement system. Or they can spend less than 10% of that to have one Cobol developer keep the system up and running.

Very often, the old systems have been working smoothly for many years. A rewrite will bring a monstrous amount of headaches and cost, especially for key systems like financial transactions.

Re:Why is Cobol still alive?

[DerekLyons]

Why is Cobol still alive and in demand?

Because there still exists in the world companies and people that have priorities other than "the latest l33t technology".
 

Why can't we just port everything over to a newer language and be done with it?

Assuming the hardware can run the newer language of course... But you still have to face the same basic problem, in a few years your l33t "newer language" will no longer be l33t or newer - it's be the stodgy old stuff that only crusty old farts program on. What then? Go through the same exercise every five to ten years?
 
That sounds more like a recipe for keeping programmers employed, regardless of value, than it does for keeping a system stable and operational. (Which a large part of why IT is often viewed with such suspicion in many quarters - because the constant rewrite/upgrade cycle that keeps the IT departments e-penis turgid rarely seems to provide much of a ROI.)
 

Doesn't it cost more to keep paying these rare programmers than to just update/convert/replace the systems?

A handful of (COBOL) programmers costs the company just a couple of million dollars a year for a stable functional system. A stable of ($l33t_language) programmers costs about the same, plus the potential costs of hardware changes, plus the potential for months of disruption or loss of data...

Re:Write that shit for a living???

[theaveng]

$120 an hour?!?!? If I can learn the mess that is 8502 assembly, I can surely learn the Cobol mess too.

(runs off to find tutorial)