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.
Out of curiosity, does knowing COBOL pay well in 2021? It seems COBOL programmers are in critical demand and free market economics should mean that COBOL programmers get paid premiums.
I would research this by myself, but not really sure where to start - and googling “COBOL Developer Salary” leads to results in the 80-120k range (which is no small number, but not significantly different from a modern language developer)
There was a comment on HN a while back to the effect that the well-known stories of COBOL devs being dragged out of retirement to earn massive consulting payments was a myth. They were actually being paid good, but not extremely good, rates for their knowledge of the business logic embedded in old code-bases. The implementation language was largely irrelevant.
It seems to be all the same story. People talk about these huge pays and guaranteed jobs but the average developer is already getting a huge pay and has no problems finding work.
The pays for COBOL do not even look that compelling and you are walking down a dead end when these systems finally modernize. I wouldn't touch cobol for anything short of $300k and the promise of enough work that I could retire within a few years.
This is exactly true. The pay is this low because there is a glut of cheap cobol developers in the US due to decades of off shoring. There have been 2000+ cobol developers laid off here over the past 5 years alone (medium midwest metro).
The reason that COBOL developers get big bucks today is because so few of them remain. During the late-80s and the '90s, there were massive layoffs that decimated the COBOL job market.
This if false, I work at a company that still employees several hundred cobol developers onshore, and many hundreds more offshore. This is down from > 1,000 several years aog. Cobol pay is mediocre, here it's around $75k at the 10 year mark. Plus they're subject to being RIF'ed and any time (reduction in force, layed off).
The idea that there's a shortage is false too. In the local market there are several hundred if not thousands of cobol developers who have been laid off over the past couple of decades. Most probably left the field entirely.
I see no reason to believe this local experience is not typical of the US in general.
Haven't touched COBOL for decades but it's hard to believe that anyone is even hiring COBOL programmers these days nevermind the stated average salary of $70k.
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 got hired as a COBOL dev just recently, in a low cost of living area, fresh out of college, for 55k. Salary will certainly go up. I see average in my state as 70-90k/year with some experience.
I agree cobol dev's salary aren't absurd, it is slightly below other dev positions. There is an opportunity for lots of money, but it comes with immense experience and understanding of specific business logic. Overall, it's not bad pay for having a pretty easy and consistent workflow. And no fads to deal with.
I made a decent salary as a COBOL developer (more like maintainer since nothing new was written). I was a first-year graduate making $80k+ in a Midwestern town. Senior salaries are probably hard to come by, I imagine, though...
Indeed so. The highest-paid devs I personally know earn their living working with old COBOL code. It's highly paid simply because there aren't that many expert COBOL programmers around anymore.
In a prior job I had, we developed enterprise software aimed at large corporations. We had to support several old mainframes that don't actually exist anymore outside of museums -- but these companies ran emulators of the mainframes solely to continue to use the software they'd been using for decades. Nobody at those companies even has the source for that software, let alone know how it really works. It just works and they can't justify the expense of reworking their entire system just to get rid of it.
I'm not sure I agree with your point about COBOL developers, though I do agree with your larger point about C. The reason that COBOL developers get big bucks today is because so few of them remain. During the late-80s and the '90s, there were massive layoffs that decimated the COBOL job market. The developers earning big bucks today doing COBOL doing today are the ones that survived those layoffs, not your "typical" COBOL developer. I would wager that the median COBOL developer either transitioned into management, out of the industry or is working in a completely different language today.
I'd actually love to work with COBOL professionally, my problem is that COBOL jobs still pay a substantially low amount of money compared to jobs using modern stacks.
For something so "critical" you'd think the base salaries would start at $250k/year; but I guess we aren't at that level of desperation yet.
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