In what way is it terrible?

When it comes to COBOL developers, there are a lot of developers retiring but there are also a lot of programmers being trained in COBOL every year. It’s for this reason that the average age of COBOL developers has stayed roughly the same for the past 2 decades despite retirements.

But that said the total number of COBOL developers is decreasing overall, which is an issue.

Not many young programmers want to learn COBOL. COBOL isn’t taught in many educational institutions. There are very few online resources that programmers can use to self-teach COBOL.

It’s a shame. COBOL is great for it’s specific use case but it isn’t very “accessible” in that regard when compared to other languages.

I’m a COBOL developer. For old COBOL systems it’s not just a case of it being expensive to “migrate away”, it’s extremely risky and for no significant benefit.

Businesses have essentially two options, modernize what they already have, or tear everything apart and start from scratch. COBOL programs don’t “just work”, they’re good at what they need to do (business transactions). Therefore, there isn’t a significant need to rewrite everything, especially when it’s possible to modernize and reuse existing business logic contained within COBOL programs. For example, COBOL programs aren’t tied to old hardware, you can run your COBOL applications on the cloud instead. This is much safer and cheaper than rewriting everything.

I would say I’m a very ideals-driven person as well. I had hoped to get a job with a company whose values aligned with my own upon graduating.

My experience was that it was really difficult getting my first job when I was being fussy with who I was sending my applications to. This is despite having both an undergraduate and postgraduate degree with the highest possible grades and also industry experience.

Eventually I gave in and started sending applications to all sorts of companies and took the first job I got offered. I’m still early in my career and I’m still working with this company.

Honestly I think for a first job it’s just worth taking whatever comes your way if it will offer you valuable experience. Then you can always apply for other jobs whilst you’re earning money and experience. That’s my plan anyway.

Other than that, I would recommend checking out this website: https://80000hours.org/

I often think about the learning pyramid and I find it lines up with my personal experiences.

The experiences which have made me better at programming are when I’m teaching others or when I’ve been working on projects in my spare time (practicing).

For example whilst I was still at university I decided to make a Discord chatbot and it really helped me build on what I’d already been taught.

Other than that I like reading coding standards documents, like this.

I encounter something similar to this often.

There’s a lot of cookie banners where “Accept All Cookies” is a single button but in order to reject cookies you have to press a “Manage Cookies” link which will have something similar to a “Reject All Cookies” button in it.

It’s very annoying.