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Comment by tapland | Hacker News Reader

There is absolutely demand. I've been doing cobol for four years and have banks and insurance companies asking me to come in for an interview all the time.

But no remote teams, no companies ready to offer any support for relocation and not a pay making a move worth it until I've built up some savings.

I think the offers I've seen in Scandinavia are 35-40k/month for a dev with some experience, and very slow wage increases.

It's true there is a lot of demand, but it's not true that it pays a ton. The devs returning from retirement with 20 years of experience with the specific systems can, and do, charge a lot though.

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What I've always wondered about this is what kind of experience companies hiring COBOL programmers are looking for. Anyone can learn COBOL the language, but it seems like the real issue with hiring COBOL devs is that you need to have experience working with mainframe technologies that are basically impossible to get any experience with outside of already having a job doing it. Kind of like how anyone can learn $some_other_language but what really matters for getting work done tends to be familiarity with libraries and stuff like that.

If it were as easy as learning COBOL for free on my own time I would do it in a heartbeat. Can't be worse than having a dead-end IT support job.

> Anyone can learn COBOL the language, but it seems like the real issue with hiring COBOL devs is that you need to have experience working with mainframe technologies that are basically impossible to get any experience with outside of already having a job doing it.

Most (IME, and I suspect generally) of the places hiring COBOL devs already have COBOL devs (and probably non-developer mainframe ops folks) doing those other tasks already, and if someone is both a half-competent programmer and knows COBOL-the-language, having them pick up the other stuff through OJT is probably tolerable.

I'm confused, is 40k/month is not paying a ton? That's half a million a year of whatever denomination.

https://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/

They didn't specify the currency or the country. That's why I asked.

I did forget to specify. It's what I've seen in DKK and SEK. Not USD.

Might be in SEK or NOK which is about a tenth the value of USD.

If it’s kroner (Norway) that’s $51,000 a year. So maybe not that either.

I assume this is 40k Swedish Kroners which is about 4k USD per month.

You should definitely be able to negotiate more than 35-40k/month, at least in any of the larger Swedish cities. Next time you interview try asking for double that and gauge the reaction, it might be more achievable than you think.

What is the day to day like?

Is it codebase migration to newer stack? Adding features in Cobol? Documentation for the next generation of Cobol developers maybe?

I think Cobol development/maintenance work should exclusively done by contractors/agencies as opposed to hiring employees. Contracting is perfect as older devs are more suited to work part time or as sub-contractors and banks don't need to have a greater responsibilty of an employee whose skillset is what they are trying to abolish.

I've worked with developing new features and maintaining existing code. Never worked on migrating away from cobol.

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