COBOL is in the news again. Millions of people are filing unemployment claims nearly all at once, and the systems to process them are failing. Why? They need to scale to unprecedented levels, they’re written in COBOL, and… we don’t have enough COBOL programmers. Here’s a look at the increase in searches for “COBOL programmers”: Most COBOL programmers are retired. The pipeline of new COBOL programmers is nearly nonexistent. Many are coming out of retirement just to help.
