Yo if you are doing COBOL systems maintenance for 90k you arent charging enough.

That's all this meme means. Consultants on COBOL maintenance can make 90k in a week. This is not the area where companies pinch pennies.

Something that maybe a software engineer union could solve.

Cobol devs that we had (while we spent insane money to retire their systems) we're getting 300-500k/year.

I'm sure companies are trying to rip off any young new entrants but 90k seems super low.

That's because the COBOL OGs are retired/ing and the industry has been training young people telling them "yeah, sorry, this is all we can pay you". Here in Europe, they'll take unemployed people from a different industry, put them on a training course, and bang! you've got a grateful new dev who doesn't know how much they are worth.
You just gotta keep spreading the message. I keep happily sharing my salary, especially with younger, less experienced devs, so we can all win better.

I once applied for a "database admin" job at one of the big credit card companies. The job description was basically "run all our Oracle databases" and the salary was in the mid 2 millions USD, but I assumed that figure was typo'ed or something ( an extra 0 maybe?)

In the interview I learned that there was no typo and it was to be one of the seven people on the planet that run the databases for this credit card processor. They said "if the database goes down then we are losing billions of dollars a minute".

Anyways I didn't get the job, but they're not all underpaid.

Not how that format works, mate.

There is no relationship between what you earn and your skill level. If there were, theoretical physics would be a top paying field. The reason is, this is capitalism and we are horrible negotiators. If you want to earn top money in a technical field, the best you can do is insert yourself in a revenue stream. Roles that are critical to revenue like a billing system or associated with a intrinsically valuable commodity e.g. petrochemical, are more lucrative than other similarly skilled professions.

Who would've thought a sector with gold flowing through its hands would be so stingy when it comes to updating their backend that they'd end up relying on a dying language, and call upon AI to update it for them rather than just paying a competent team to create and rigorously test a new backend in a modern language

Honestly not the right format for that meme template lol. The monkey should represent one person doing both looks.

I think some COBOL consultants are very well paid, especially since they are a rare breed.

what i’m gathering from this thread is that i should learn cobol

Cobol is the B-52 of programming languages. Sure there are fancy and expensive new ones or there, but it'll probably outlast them all.

Saw this post and all the redditors getting dreamy eyed at the idea of learning COBOL.

https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson

In Canada, the Ministry of Health pays colleges to teach kids COBOL and JCL. It's a steady job, pension, good bennies. I know a handful of people who went that route, rather than the riskier private sector.

I had a friend at university who got a job fixing cobol stuff before Y2K. The bank paid him extremely well, housed him in a luxury apartment during the job, and, as he had no driving licence, dropped in a car with free driver for him.

I'd be happy if I could land a web dev role for 40k at this point

Where do you learn this... Cobol?