Cobol is still widely used in the gov sectors.
I bet those legacy Cobol programs were initially written in the 1960s-70s on punch cards! The banking industry had a lot of legacy Cobol too. My understanding 30 years ago was that there was an unfulfilled demand for Cobol programmers and they were being paid a premium over the industry average salaries. The reason was the computer industry had moved on, Cobol was no longer being taught and nobody wanted to get locked into ancient languages that had no future. Cobol wasn't shiny enough to attract people to forsake the latest and greatest thing.
Gov cobol programmers are still making a premium if you can get into one of the jobs.
The old fuckers in them never leave and dont take promotions. So they rarely open. Death and retirement open them these days.
I think I would go nuts with a job like that. I'd call it drudgery, same ol' shit, day after day. It would be far more interesting to convert the mess to C or C++. Measure performance improvements, cost effectiveness. Is govt running Cobol on seriously antiquated computers/mainframes - hard to source parts and equipment? Maybe there is a niche company supporting the old stuff that I'm not aware of? If so, they can about name their price.
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