The problem here is that people who understand these systems are all retiring. Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them.

So the real challenge companies are facing is will there be enough people to safely maintain these systems in the next decade. If they do not, it means failures in credit card systems, airline reservations, insurance claims and more.

It sounds like they will still need to hire and train human talent who can understand the code, and evaluate and integrate outputs of AI systems that conform to the specific compliance and data retention requirements of these industries. And also people who can enforce said compliance, and a lot of other things. Sounds like a complex problem without a neat off-the-shelf solution

Correct, they are retiring, for sure.

The last thing I’d ever put into mission-critical systems is an LLM.

So let’s hope it’s a mainframe sandbox so future COBOL programmers can learn on it. :)

In any case, COBOL systems work precisely because no one is constantly tinkering with them to “add a new framework”.

The last time I saw, someone made a “Hello World” app in Electron, and it was 220 MB.

Howgh.

We've been hearing this claim for well over a decade and it hasn't happened, these companies are surviving somehow.

I suspect with developers learning on the job as best they can with some limited hand over from the retiring developers.

Say a system was built in 1975 by a 25 year old developer, they'd be 76 today, not 60.

There isn't any tsunami of COBOL work coming, it would have arrived over a decade ago if there was.

Wouldn't the lack of supply drive up wages until more new talent is incentivized?

That is the current landscape today. Mainframe engineers are in high demand and good ones are paid quite well.

I've heard from a global bank, they have one mainframe developer in the team who is past 70. She manages a critical credit card service and gets paid in the upper end of 6 figures to work 20 hrs a week. She's the only one who knows that system. Lots of stories like this.

Maybe they should pay her to mentor someone lmao

Would she consider taking on someone interested in learning COBOL to support her and the team?

> Majority of the devs are over 60 and there's simply not enough new talent coming in to replace them.

Yawn this tired old yarn, again. Mainframe development was offshored from the US decades ago. These retiring cobol programmers simply don’t exist in numbers that matter. The market could be to the companies doing the offshore work, but they’ve been throwing bodies at this problem for a long time, maybe there’s a market there maybe not.

Throwing bodies has been the primary way to approach mainframe modernization and a majority of them do end up failing (https://softwaremodernizationservices.com/insights/mainframe...).

Now bringing in AI agents that are incredibly good at software engineering into the modernization lifecycle can completely change the landscape. That's the vision we're building towards at Hypercubic.

Previously you might need 50 engineers and 5+ years to modernize a mainframe application, now with Hypercubic, we can compress that down to 1/5th of those estimates.

Failure at 1/5 the price is still failure.

With agentic systems that are extremely proficient in the mainframe ecosystem, the failure rates for modernization should dramatically go down.

What we're attempting was not possible two years or even a year ago.

True story. I used to work for a company that developed both mainframe software as well as “enterprise” software (based on Unix systems). The two sides of the house were pretty separate. While I was on the enterprise side, through a fluke of geography, I worked in the building with many of the mainframe folks. In a normal office, you might have emails go out about events like employee birthdays, marriages, and kids being born. In the mainframe office there were emails that went out about employee deaths. Several of the employees had walkers.

The age of mainframe folks is highly bi-modal. The original folks are dying of old age. There is a new crop of 35-and-under folks that have sprung up as they noticed that the work is very steady and the pay is good. Between ages 35 and 65, there aren’t many mainframe people.