From the article: * State unemployment agencies are notoriously underfunded* And there’s the problem summarized in less than a single sentence. Yes, they need help, but it’s the same kind of “help” as in “I want a BMW but I only have a dollar, please help” There would be a ton more COBOL coders if companies paid the equivalent of FANG companies - I say this as a former COBOL coder myself
I remember reading some years ago that there are or were schools in India teaching COBOL because of the demand for maintenance programmers and the aging of US programmers who did that sort of thing in the 1970s. I wonder if that is still a thing.
They probably had their own Banking industry in mind. This was in Argentina so YMMV. Back in 2010 i had friends in university looking for internships and first jobs and COBOL was a real prospect. A friend took a deal with accenture where they would give you a 2 month-ish course and then send you to consult for banks. I remember the whole "COBOL devs are retiring! salaries are gonna be huge!" which was likely to be true for the agency's rate but didn't trickle down to coders, they used to make as much as the lower rung of IT (QA tester, etc). Later in life I worked at a bank and met the fabled close to retirement AS400/Cobol developer. He didn't make more than any ssr developer with a modern stack in demand.