• AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    You missed the banks tripping over themselves to find a COBOL programmer. My father makes stupid amounts of money (read, $400-$1600 per hour) maintaining bank COBOL systems. My father is in his 70s.

    COBOL is almost as much of a PITA as Lisp, but no one, not even the US Military that developed Lisp will pay the really big bucks to maintain it.

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      6 months ago

      I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        6 months ago

        That’s probably true. My father has been developing in COBOL since the '70s. I didn’t bother learning it because I was under the impression that he was being paid more for experience than his basic skills.

    • brian@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      6 months ago

      not sure what you’re talking about with lisp lol, the military may have some dialect they wrote but lisp started as an academic language and there’s plenty of still supported and used dialects outside of that

    • fidodo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      6 months ago

      It’s pretty simple isn’t it? If you want to be paid a lot of money, learn how to do what other people can’t or won’t. In the software industry those opportunities are all over the place. You just need to find it and take it.