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COBOL programmers have some of the highest salaries of any other languages specialized programmers, but I don't know if that is due to rarity of COBOL programmers, the fact that those jobs are all government or financial institution employed, or because the average experience for them is 58 years?
The Stackoverflow developer survey debunks this myth, year after year. Not only do COBOL developers make about the middle of the pack, they sit at an average of 18 YOE which makes absolute bank in other stacks
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language
Programming salaries are so inconsistent and these salaries by language become so meaningless.
My buddy who works in Google makes 600k but can also call himself a Typescript developer. I'm a dept lead but I've spent the past few months fixing business critical code, so depending on how the question is asked, id look like a overpriced jQuery/Angular/bash developer.
This is true, but the Stackoverflow datapoint was the only quantitative one I could think of. Anecdotally, I see senior COBOL developers making less than juniors but still thinking they're paid lots
Oh absolutely!
Cheezus. Those salaries are lower than i expected to see.
Yes.
The idea that a job req could actually ask for "50+ years experience" in a given piece of computing technology just gives me goosebumps. Like someone did a really good job 50 years ago, or a really bad one. Either way, it's astonishing that any one thing could be in production use that long or longer.
When a piece of software does a very limited set of tasks that cannot be meaningfully improved, and when minor mistakes can equate to millions in cash or even lives lost or ruined, the name of the game is maintain, maintain, maintain. It ain't broke, leave it the hell alone, because updating, upgrading or porting your system will inevitably lead to some sort of mistake.
You're exactly right. And if the retrocomputing and retrogaming communities have taught us anything, it's that good emulation can make such systems last for a very long time.
IBM are still making mainframes
I note they recently changed the way they charge large users , to the benefit of users with uneven compute loads (after buying an IBM mainframe you must also pay IBM for the amount of processing you do on it)
Contractors make a lot of money, but that would be separate to standard engineering salaries
I've known a few people that graduated about a decade ago and decided to work in really niche tech like COBOL, Salesforce/SOQL/SOSL, VB6, Sitecore, etc. Hell, one guy I met was a professional "ActionScript" programmer! Many in-store and company kiosks used Flash to program their interfaces, so he'd do basic maintenance, add features, and collect six figures for half a year of work and all the travel around Europe/Asia he wants.
or because the average experience for them is 58 years
Some have more?!
Most have more. Like 3 guys just learned it as a prank last year for the first time in generations, which kind of threw off the curve. Every other COBOL programmer is technically old enough to retire, but they are contractually required to continue working until the heat death of the universe.
Dang, you guys are single handedly bringing that average down huh?
but they are contractually required to continue working until the heat death of the universe.
This sounds worse than Russia. Please fix.
could be due to the rarity of COBOL programmers
The big users of COBOL are the sort that don't pay their developers all that well. Government, banks, giant corporations. The sort of places that still have pensions for long service