The vast majority of the IT media obsess about new technologies and at predictable periodicity proclaim the death of a language introduced in 1959, COBOL. Their obsession with new technologies is understandable as they (according to the media experts) will change the way we eat, sleep and work. Of course, nobody holds them to their predictions. Sensationalism as a sales and marketing tactic sells.

Cobol, from the late 80s, has been getting a bum rap from the media, and the language is so old that it just does not have any media cache other than predicting its imminent demise.

 

 This post was triggered by an article in InfoWorld, "The 7 Dirtiest jobs in IT"  (Fair Warning: the article is a veritable ad trap, go there and you will see what I mean). No surprise, Cobol was included in the list and in fact was kind of a left handed compliment to Cobol, IMS and other mainframe tools. This got me thinking...

Cobol has been around for many, many years. I have personally seen it in manufacturing companies in the 90s running business critical applications on AS/400  boxes.  How will it compare with a new technology, say Ajax. I threw in PHP in the comparison mix for good measure. I know financial and manufacturing companies in general and Fortune 1000 companies in general are reliant on cobol based mainframe systems. I wanted to compare the median salaries and the job demand in these sectors. Below are my findings....
 

Generated By:  OdinJobs - Technology Job Search Engine

The median salary comparison on the left was done across industries and to my surprise cobol median salary was greater that PHP median salary and within respectable distance of Ajax median salary.  Median salary was generated from advertised jobs that had a salary. (Its a fair assumption that the percentage of advertised jobs with salary is independent of the skills required.)

 

I then compared the job demand in the financial industry for Cobol, PHP and Ajax. The financial industry needs 2 times more cobol developers than PHP developers and about 1.5 times more than Ajax developers. This was very similar in the manufacturing industry. Of course when I exclude any industry restriction, the demand for Ajax developers were 2 times higher than cobol developers. You can look at the comparison and also come up with your own comparison by using our Market Statistics Comparison tool. (Feel free to use the graphs on your blog or website. Just ask you to keep the links at the bottom)

Generated By: OdinJobs - Technology Job Search Engine

Cobol is not dead by any means. In Fortune 1000 companies, financial and manufacturing industries in particular, have built business systems based on cobol, mainframes, that is not going anywhere. A large scale re-write is fraught with risks and no CIO will pull that trigger. I bet my non-existent salary that no one in those companies know the entire business logic that these systems embody and that there is very little to no documentation.

Cobol  will keep going and systems will be retro-fitted to satisfy new business requirements. Companies like Micro Focus has built wrappers, to make cobol run on Windows, Unix and Linux platforms and they seem to be doing good business at it. Its about time IT media realize that Cobol is not going anywhere and stop foolishly predicting its demise again and again. They need to realize that if a language, system establishes itself in a Fortune 1000 IT shop, it is very difficult to shut it down. In the meantime, people with cobol skills should be happy to know that they are in demand and their salary prospects are comparable to other "cool technologies". See the latest Cobol Jobs.

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