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: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)