That's because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them "yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you". Here in Europe, they'll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you've got a grateful new dev who doesn't know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.I once applied for a "database admin" job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically "run all our Oracle databases" and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo'ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)
In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said "if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute".
Anyways I didn't get the job, but they're not all underpaid.
There is no relationship between what you earn and your skill level. If there were, theoretical physics would be a top paying field. The reason is, this is capitalism and we are horrible negotiators. If you want to earn top money in a technical field, the best you can do is insert yourself in a revenue stream. Roles that are critical to revenue like a billing system or associated with a intrinsically valuable commodity e.g. petrochemical, are more lucrative than other similarly skilled professions.
Who would've thought a sector with gold flowing through its hands would be so stingy when it comes to updating their backend that they'd end up relying on a dying language, and call upon AI to update it for them rather than just paying a competent team to create and rigorously test a new backend in a modern language
Honestly not the right format for that meme template lol. The monkey should represent one person doing both looks.
Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.
https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.
At what point does the cost of tech migration outweigh the cost of training people on a more and more specialist paid language just to not have to migrate to a memory safe higher level language like C or Go or Rust or Lua.
Didn't say python because oh sweet Jesus the slowdown alone would grind the global economy to a halt if we were running all our banking software on Python XD
I swear to god, companies are nowadays just picking the solution with the most buzzwords. Any compiler engineering student knows how to write a transpiler from one language to another, while getting this right is a cumbersome task, it still completly automated afterwards. Just hire a few compiler engineering phds and the job is done in at least half a year.
Look what i found after a quick google search:
I thought everyone kind of knew this. And then the PCMag article dropped.
The more important a job is, the less paid the work is. Conversely, the more bullshit the job is, the more pay there is.
In my experiemce, Java shoots processing usage up while COBOL uses much lesser CPU / memory
