<story><title>Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016)</title><url>https://ezali.substack.com/p/interviewing-my-mother-a-mainframe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptmcc</author><text>&amp;gt; I can only imagine the fat paycheck a 20-year old mainframe programmer would get though, because your age in this case would be invaluable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny, people frequently assume this would be true but reality doesn&amp;#x27;t really bear this out. It&amp;#x27;s typically pretty average to even below average which contributes to the talent pipeline problem.&lt;p&gt;The other side of it is that its not the technical stuff like &amp;quot;knows COBOL&amp;quot; that is so immensely valuble. Any average dev can &amp;quot;learn COBOL&amp;quot; but that&amp;#x27;s not actually the valuable thing. The anecdotes of COBOL programmers coming out of retirement for 500k&amp;#x2F;yr contracts has little to do with COBOL, but their accumulated institutional knowledge of the giant ball of business logic encoded in that COBOL.&lt;p&gt;If these banks and other institutions actually did write fat paychecks to young mainframe programmers the demographic problem they&amp;#x27;re facing might not be so bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>importantbrian</author><text>I went to grad school with a guy who was in that situation. He worked at a bank and got laid off during the financial crisis. The plan was for the bank to port the old system over to Java or something like that, and they were &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; to the end of the project and they thought at that point the rewrite team was comfortable enough with COBOL that they could do the rest of the rewrite without him. Turns out that yes they understood COBOL just fine, but they desperately needed his institutional knowledge. He ended up agreeing to come back on a part-time basis at some obscene consulting rate for however long the transition took and in the meantime, he did grad school part-time to skill up.</text></comment>
<story><title>Interviewing my mother, a mainframe COBOL programmer (2016)</title><url>https://ezali.substack.com/p/interviewing-my-mother-a-mainframe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ptmcc</author><text>&amp;gt; I can only imagine the fat paycheck a 20-year old mainframe programmer would get though, because your age in this case would be invaluable.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny, people frequently assume this would be true but reality doesn&amp;#x27;t really bear this out. It&amp;#x27;s typically pretty average to even below average which contributes to the talent pipeline problem.&lt;p&gt;The other side of it is that its not the technical stuff like &amp;quot;knows COBOL&amp;quot; that is so immensely valuble. Any average dev can &amp;quot;learn COBOL&amp;quot; but that&amp;#x27;s not actually the valuable thing. The anecdotes of COBOL programmers coming out of retirement for 500k&amp;#x2F;yr contracts has little to do with COBOL, but their accumulated institutional knowledge of the giant ball of business logic encoded in that COBOL.&lt;p&gt;If these banks and other institutions actually did write fat paychecks to young mainframe programmers the demographic problem they&amp;#x27;re facing might not be so bad.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tristor</author><text>&amp;gt; If these banks and other institutions actually did write fat paychecks to young mainframe programmers the demographic problem they&amp;#x27;re facing might not be so bad.&lt;p&gt;When I first started work I was involved in banking&amp;#x2F;insurance mainframe stuff, and it was honestly a pretty terrible working environment for reasons that spanned from the mundane (like dress codes) to the esoteric (like the horrible crufty legacy codebase).  I would have put up with it if it paid well, but it didn&amp;#x27;t.  In fact, it paid significantly worse than the job I&amp;#x27;d had before which was installing physical cable plant (fiber optics and copper ethernet), the reason I took it was at least the office had air conditioning, but it certainly wasn&amp;#x27;t something I wanted to turn into a career.&lt;p&gt;As a mid-level windows sysadmin doing customer-facing phone support at a cloud provider, I made nearly 30% more than I had as a junior mainframe guy at a bank&amp;#x2F;insurance company.  The difference in the skillsets and their commonality was massive, yet the pay was significantly worse for the mainframe work despite it being a rare skillset in a high value industry.  I remembered when I was in this job that guys who worked on trading desk backend code were far better compensated while working in easier development environments on less esoteric codebases, the mainframe folks were the lowest paid of the developers at that company, at every level of seniority.  The only person we worked with who was well compensated was an independent contractor who&amp;#x27;d worked there previously for 30 years before retiring.</text></comment>