this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
578 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59569 readers
4077 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I work primarily in a Long Tail language (languages don't die, but they have a long tail where usage slowly creeps away). I tell the business that we could ultimately solve all the problems with the platform except for one: finding new programmers to hire for it. That's what will ultimately force us to migrate. Doesn't have anything to do with cost or ability to take on new features or handle new ways of doing things.
When it comes to COBOL developers, there are a lot of developers retiring but there are also a lot of programmers being trained in COBOL every year. It's for this reason that the average age of COBOL developers has stayed roughly the same for the past 2 decades despite retirements. But that said the total number of COBOL developers is decreasing.
It is certainly an issue. Not many young programmers want to learn COBOL. COBOL isn't taught in many educational institutions. There are very few online resources that programmers can use to self-teach COBOL. More often than not people are trained in COBOL by their employer. I didn't know how to program in COBOL until I started at my current company (and even then I stumbled into this position accidentally because I wasn't aware that junior developer jobs in COBOL existed when I graduated university).
It's a shame.
I feel this way about mainframes sometimes too, I had a class in mainframes but we weren't really taught about job options or where they still fit in the industry.