this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.
COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.
I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn't be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between "the proper way to do things", and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it's been around and having things built on top of it.
That's probably true. My father has been developing in COBOL since the '70s. I didn't bother learning it because I was under the impression that he was being paid more for experience than his basic skills.
not sure what you're talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there's plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that
There may be, but as far as I can tell, they won't pay what the people that still need COBOL are willing to pay
It's pretty simple isn't it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can't or won't. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.
Dude, should I learn COBOL?
I'd recommend against it. Seems to cause my father no end of headaches