The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they’re super important. Nobody’s hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody’s contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.
The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that’s not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.
No wonder COBOL programmers are paid a lot, because what would be a 1-liner for “hello world” in other languages looks like this in Cobol:
IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. IDSAMPLE. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. PROCEDURE DIVISION. DISPLAY 'HELLO WORLD'. STOP RUN.This is already $6000 worth of code right there!
I wonder how much open source COBOL is out there for LLMs to harvest.
The thing people always overlook is that these legacy systems are only still running because they’re super important. Nobody’s hiring a junior COBOL dev to maintain NORAD, and hopefully nobody’s contemplating putting ChatGPT in charge either.
The move if you want this kind of job is to learn a language that’s not quite a dinosaur yet, and have 20 years experience in 20 years. Perl or PHP maybe.