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I've had a bunch of recent projects reverse-engineering old COBOL code, in financial services. Mostly to figure out the best way to replace the old systems with something newer, so not really as a "COBOL dev", though.
I heard a story about replacing COBOL with JavaScript ... and my skin still crawls thinking about it.
I met a dev who's mom had been working on legacy banking systems her whole career. She had started in the eighties and she still did some urgent jobs at a crazy rate despite officially having retired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is a place where everyone is, so it's reasonable to assume that some Cobol devs may also lurk here.
Everyone except most developers I know.
If I were to venture to guess: I'd say "most developers" seek work-life balance and aren't interested in reading long-form articles on how to do X or Y when they are off the clock.
They wouldn't hang around here though.
Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel…
Currently working on migration of 30yo ERP without tests in Progress to Kotlin+PostgreSQL.
AI agents don’t care which code to read or convert into tests. They just need an automated feedback loop and some human oversight.
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.
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.
Seeing the horrible performance from Indian offshore firms with modern languages I cannot imagine the mess they make with legacy languages like Cobol. Or is it the other way around?