That's interesting. Must be hard to hire for nowadays. Then again, my friend says at least one government is still using COBOL!

I have a coworker who, when he got out of school in the 90s, got hired to write COBOL. There's a ton of COBOL out there, and why not? As much as "waterfall" is a fiction, high-spec, super-detailed-spec projects actually do have some advantages as they are usually well thought out. That is where COBOL played, and why those apps have run since the 70s.

Sometimes the entire specification really does exist before you start. Certain kinds of software applications have not had substantive new functionality in decades, so everyone knows what a complete implementation of it looks like.

Alternately, they change slowly, and they have to be right.

Where is the link?

COBOL will outlive all of us.

It probably was hard to hire in the mid 2000s. I applied for a job as fraud/engineer/technical investigator and didn't get it. The rejection phone call was we noticed you have "Pascal" on your resume, can you please come and help us out to document and extend a Delphi application for the same pay, we have created a job for you? I did.