October 16, 2006
COBOL: Job 1
On the heels of my COBOL: 'Nuf Said post, I ran across a set of statistics on the current state of the venerable "COmmon Business Oriented Language" known as COBOL.
According to a Computerworld survey of 352 companies, 62 percent said they still use COBOL -- and 75 percent of that 62 percent said they use it "a lot." Moreover, 58 percent said they are using it for new application development.
But the problem with COBOL that organizations face isn't a technical one, it is a personnel one. They just can't find enough COBOL programmers. According to the Computerworld article written by Gary Anthes, 45 percent of the respondents said their "ability to hire Cobol programmers was either 'worse' or 'much worse' than their ability to hire programmers for modern languages such as Visual Basic, C++ and Java."
Part of the reason for this is that COBOL is no longer being taught in many schools. I did a quick, and admittedly non-scientific, search of three leading universities and couldn't find any classes that focused on COBOL. Plenty of Java. Lots of C++. But COBOL? Forget it.
At the same time, a quick search of TechCareers using the keyword "COBOL" turned up 304 job openings. If I didn't know better, I'd think that the Y2K bug-a-boo hasn't gone away. If you recall, COBOL programmers were coming out of retirement in the late '90s -- and writing their own ticket to do so -- just to cope with issues surrounding Y2K hysteria.
(Oh, I really miss seeing those article headlines, like "Countdown to Chaos!" and "Y2K Crime Alert!" to "The Gun for all Reasons" and "Wood Stoves: Reliable Heat Y2K Can't Stop!".) For a refresher on what Y2K was all about, see articles such as:
No, COBOL won't go away anytime soon and if you're worried about paying the mortgage, learning about COBOL is close to a sure bet.
Posted by Jon Erickson at 11:27 AM Permalink
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