Rich kids are into COBOL

[Roe Peterson]

> On Feb 17, 2015, at 12:46 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
>> My stars and garters--I just noticed the following article posted back in
>> September that college students learning COBOL make more money:
>> 
>> http://readwrite.com/2014/09/17/cobol-programming-language-hot-or-not
> 
> I've sat on the Industry Advisory Council a few times for our local
> DeVry Institute campus... every year, they ask, "should we still teach
> COBOL?"  Every year, Motorist Insurance, Grange Insurance, Nationwide
> Insurance, and JPM Chase say, "send us more people who know COBOL."  A
> few years ago, every graduate took 4 courses in COBOL.  Now, they all
> still take one, and if you are on the "Enterprise" (mainframe) track,
> you still take the full series.

I wouldn't wish a COBOL career on my worst enemy.  What a god-awful mess.

And yes, I know how and why it came to be.  And all about legacy code bases and the high cost of migration.  I was forced to take cobol back in 1978, never attended a lecture, handed in all the assignments, wrote the final, passed the course, and promptly forgot the whole thing.

Still, what a god-awful mess :-)