How many of those React jobs include RSUs from privately owned companies? I would venture that approximately 100% of the COBOL jobs that's all cash compensation/salary.
I've read that most of the companies still using COBOL are banks, insurance companies, etc. They seem like the companies, if any, that could provide really compelling salaries for something with allegedly high demand and increasingly small supply.
What's not mentioned is that there is a large outsourced population of COBOL devs. Talking with a former colleague who did COBOL for years, he can't find anything in COBOL that pays well, so he's staying at my last company doing VB.net and batch processing for their ERP system
I started in the mainframe COBOL world, and I've added COBOL search terms to job listing searches. Compensation is ridiculously low (I mean ~50K in SV itself).
What's the implication here? I only know one COBOL developer but they seem to be doing quite well for themselves, making over $400k a year for something like 15 hours of work a week.
I think COBOL devs don’t get paid all that much. They just train fresh grads in cheap markets. The premium wages for COBOL were certainly a thing in the Y2K days.
There are definitely new devs learning COBOL. I'm not sure where I saw it, but I could have sworn I saw an article or blog post about these mission critical companies paying insane wages and signing bonuses to devs who would sign-on to learn & maintain their infrastructure. And since these jobs would likely be on prem for security reasons, they don't have to pay insane Silicon Valley wages either.
Imagine living in Cincinnati making $250k maintaining COBOL? Some people are totally fine with that paradigm and will keep the system running as long as it needs to.
I’m generally pretty amazed at how low the salaries are for COBOL developers relative to the criticality of the systems being maintained, and also how common those legacy code bases are.
I'd happily take a COBOL job for $250k + benefits and a 3% annual raise. That's hardly a crazy salary either. It's still a substantial discount over what a lot of technology companies pay, and likely inline with what most mid-level managers at banks and insurance companies earn already.
But COBOL jobs don't pay anywhere near that kind of coin, and they likely never will in my lifetime. The systems in place are solid enough that they can survive the resolving door of shitty, underpaid contractors who are hired to work on them. Nothing every improves, but it also never gets worse.
I have heard that a developer willing to learn COBOL can land a massive salary. Is this actually true? What companies are hiring/looking for people and is there a place to get realistic numbers?
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