When lucrative COBOL contracts make you exhume decades-old enterprise code
Description
The meme is a two-panel SpongeBob SquarePants scene featuring Mr. Krabs in a murky green under-the-sea graveyard. In the top panel he stands beside a large stone "#1" headstone that has the word "COBOL" digitally pasted across its base, holding a small shovel. A subtitle under the image reads, "Am I really going to defile this grave for money?" In the bottom panel Mr. Krabs is already waist-deep in a freshly dug hole beside the same headstone, and the subtitle says, "Of course I am!" The joke plays on developers (or consultants) eagerly returning to supposedly dead legacy languages like COBOL because maintaining them is still highly paid in enterprise environments, highlighting the persistent business value - and technical debt - of legacy systems
Comments
9Comment deleted
Kubernetes may get the keynote, but the real money is still six feet under with the 1976 COBOL batch that clears ACH - hand me the shovel and the SOW
The bank's mainframe has been running flawlessly for 40 years, but the only person who understands it retired in 2003 and we've been deploying to production by copying his handwritten notes ever since
The real horror isn't maintaining COBOL - it's realizing that the 'legacy system' paying your mortgage was already considered legacy when your tech lead was born, and the original developers retired before Git was invented. At least Mr. Krabs gets immediate gratification; you'll spend six months just finding where the business logic actually lives in those 40,000 lines of PROCEDURE DIVISION spaghetti
COBOL isn’t dead, it’s an annuity: React -> REST -> CICS -> the same 1978 copybook, and the only thing truly modern is the hourly rate
Modernization strategy: slap a 3270-to-REST shim over CICS and pay the code archaeologist $300/hr while the JCL keeps printing money
COBOL: Buried decades ago, but the paychecks keep crawling out like it's tax season
context please? Comment deleted
A old lang that everyone think is dead but still being used in many big system with high demand. So you learn cobol for money. Comment deleted
learn deprecated technologies, win stupid prizes earn big money Comment deleted