Chance to become a good COBOL programmer ...!

David Brown is worried. As managing
director of the IT transformation group at
Bank of New York Mellon, he is
responsible for the health and welfare of
112,500 Cobol programs, 343 million
lines of code, that run core banking and
other operations. But many of the people
who built that code base, some of which
goes back to the early days of Cobol in
the 1960s, will be retiring over the next
several years.
"We have people we will be losing who
have a lot of business knowledge. That
scares me," Brown says. He's concerned
about finding new Cobol programmers,
who are expected to be in short supply in
the next five to ten years. But what really
keeps him up at night is the thought that
he may not be able to transfer the deep
understanding of the business logic
embedded within the bank's programs
before it walks out the door with the
employees who are retiring.
More than 50 years after Cobol came on
the scene, the language is alive and well
in the world's largest corporations, where
it excels at executing large scale batch
and transaction processing operations on
mainframes. The language is known for its
scalability, performance and mathematical
accuracy. But as the Boomer generation
prepares to check out of the workforce, IT
executives are taking a fresh look at their
options.