Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.
My father-in-law is one of the last COBOL experts. Before he retired he spent 15 years training 3 people in COBOL so the business he worked for would not collapse. COBOL is irreplaceable and it is not being taught in any school in the USA.
They’re gonna use AI to write it, and it’s gonna be exactly what you expect
The banks still use COBOL, let’s have grok rewrite their software too
My father-in-law is one of the last COBOL experts. Before he retired he spent 15 years training 3 people in COBOL so the business he worked for would not collapse. COBOL is irreplaceable and it is not being taught in any school in the USA.
There’s a lot more COBOL folks out there than people realize. It also is still being taught in some universities.
UNT has an entire mainframe-focused course track:
Texas A&M has at least one COBOL class as well: https://catalog.tamusa.edu/search/?P=CISA+2354
I haven’t checked other unis, but I suspect there are plenty more.
That’s not to say these clowns know anything about it though, or they wouldn’t have been working for Must in the first place.
Interesting! I was almost certain that COBOL wasn’t being taught anymore.