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Re:Engineer – must not have experience in Node, Ruby, PHP, A... by rgbrenner on Monday April 05, 2021 @08:48AM (#26698252)
Im not sure thats true. Last year when the unemployment systems got overwhelmed, I read a state was desperate for cobol developers and was offering some laughable salary. Searching for 'cobol developer average salary' seems to confirm it's not worth much.

These systems are now so old that the only people running them are those that have consistently under-allocated resources to IT. Penny pinchers arent known for paying out huge salaries to people.

Much more likely they'll continue paying as little as possible, and then award a huge contract to Oracle et al to rewrite it when they cant find anyone.

Re:Engineer – must not have experience in Node, Ruby, PHP, A... by dogma1138 on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:09AM (#26698425)
The state might be, however they’ll likely contract the work out and the company who’ll pick it up will pay a lot especially if they taking on that specific contract to get their foot in the door.

You also have a lot of financial institutions, insurance companies, health providers and big retail/manufacturing companies that have a lot of legacy systems and they pay quite well.

I don’t know about that specific case but quite often government institutions are locked into salary tiers they can’t offer more nor do they actually expect to find anyone for that position it’s just often a requirement proper to issuing a tender.

Basically it goes like this “we tried and we can’t find anyone for $56,000 per year to fix our system, we issued a tender and got proposals for $350-400K so that’s the budget we need”.