The places that need to replace COBOL devs aging out of the work force with apps still running are among the places least likely to practice age discrimination to start with (and even if they were inclined to, there's not a pipeline of fresh out of college/bootcamp COBOL devs.)
(C#/Java have lots more opportunities at the same type of workplaces, so aren't bad choices but also lots more competition at all experience levels and from more traditional career paths; still, late-entrants with relative domain expertise can be quite competitive with pure programmers.)
COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40 something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.
I would argue the least amount of age bias is in cobol and then c++ and then .net
cobol is also pretty easy to learn. Most of it will be maintenance of insurance and financial software. But basically nobody's looking to get into entry level cobol maintenance.
Some companies that have large COBOL code bases don't hire "software developers" -- they hire people who have worked in other careers and want to switch to software development and then they extensively train them internally. This could explain the median age of COBOL developers remaining constant.
True, but if the Cobol market is for 10k developers worldwide, not many people will venture there, even for higher pay. Cause if you get fired from your Cobol job and there’s no openings for Cobol devs, your market value just plummeted to $40k as a Junior Javascript dev ;)
And despite what we may think, except for the big tech companies, everyone else doesn’t really hire generalists. You could have 20 years experience as a programmer in 10 different languages, HR still wants a Java programmer with 5 years of Java experience.
Sorry to disapoint you. My friend who works in recruiting told me, that one company wouldn't accept perfectly skilled candidate, because he was around the same age as their current COBOL developer. They argumented, that they don't want both of them die around the same time.
How would you suggets developers born in mid 80s/90s to learn COBOL and find COBOL jobs?
As far as I know, practically there are no COBOL jobs around me anymore. Big established institutions like telco and bank usually use Java. On the other side, the younger kids usually prefer something like NodeJS or Go.
I know two people who started as COBOL devs, not sure what they're doing right now but they're both in their 40s. They were part of a big bank recruitment in the noughties.
I generally agree with this sentiment, though COBOL may be overkill. Anything stable and not latest/greatest probably helps a lot - Java, C#, and of course C/C++. Big boring companies seem to have older people - my company's average age is probably in the mid 40s.
Same here. Working with a crappier language in return for retiring earlier is an acceptable trade off for me. Even if after a decade of working in COBOL I became unable to find another IT job, I wouldn't care, because I'd be already happily early retired.
Out of curiosity I just made a short search for COBOL jobs in my area. The few I found actually pay less than my current Java job.
The language isn't hard, getting new devs that stay 15+ years to learn the ins and outs of systems that large is.
We're making a push to get our cobol devs some kind of bonus foe sticking around because we can hire a ton of junior devs but after a few years only the ones nearing retirement are left.
Agree that I would not love working with 40 years older COBOL programmers. However, I for sure would love to work with 40 years older lispers or smalltalkers.
I am wondering if in 40 years from now, youngsters would love (or not) to work with [ruby|java|js|nodejs] programmers.
The following is hearsay based on a few people I know in that field, so take it with a grain of salt.
These days, most companies seem increasingly resigned/accepting of the fact that they're not going to find young, dynamic COBOL programmers in the wild. On top of that, old-school COBOL has a knack for creating idiosyncratic software architectures. Learning how some particular monstrosity was taped together is more important than the language itself, which is brain-dead simple. And there are few such COBOL codebases out there in the wild to read.
The result is a move towards hiring and training good programmers in-house, quite counter to the general trend in the industry. Which makes for good job security but also makes it hard to enter directly.
(C#/Java have lots more opportunities at the same type of workplaces, so aren't bad choices but also lots more competition at all experience levels and from more traditional career paths; still, late-entrants with relative domain expertise can be quite competitive with pure programmers.)
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