this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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I fantasize about being one of those extremely well-paid Cobol consultants when I reach the later stages of my career. Hoping that I can earn a full year's salary in 3-4 months and take the rest of the time off as a semi-retirement. It would be easier said than done, but it's a dream that helps me get through the days when I get sick of the daily grind.
I think those jobs are a myth. You probably get like a 20% premium for using COBOL, so if you look up the salary of a Cobol consultant in America it's going to seem like an enormous salary on an absolute scale.
But so is a C++ consultant in America or whatever. Probably not worth learning COBOL for.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I have looked once or twice and the COBOL salaries seemed entirely normal.
You're probably right. I think COBOL development is one of the cases where the crazier stories are the ones that bubble to the top. The regular scene is probably more mundane.
I do think there are a few advantages to learning COBOL over C++. COBOL seems to be much stickier - companies that use it seem much more hesitant to replace it than a lot of the companies that use C++, and as a result, they will probably get more desperate. And while there's definitely a lot more C++ out there than COBOL, I have to imagine that the number of people under 50 that use COBOL is probably tiny, while C++ still has a very large userbase. On the other hand, consulting depends a lot on your portfolio, references, and past accomplishments, and nobody's going to pay 1k EUR/USD/etc. per hour (exaggerating, obviously) if you don't have any credentials. It takes time to build that up.
Ultimately, I do think you're pretty spot on, but we'll have to see. This is more just a fantasy I tell myself to make it seem like retirement is closer than it probably is....
That won’t happen. There were many Cobol consultants at my previous job, and they earned less than in house engineers on different stacks.