this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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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.