I'm 22 and professional COBOL developer working for a bank, would love to move but money is good.

@cabrasm You don't really grow as a dev doing COBOL

They know you would love to move, that's why the money is good.

Which country is this?

Also I would suggest to invest in a table stand for your laptop+separate keyboard/mouse, for starters you can google "roost stand". Take care of your neck and posture man.

@zemaitis South Africa

How did u learn it?

I don't get what the big deal is with these banks. Redo the systems and it would save money on maintenance big time

@beegC0de Banks move slowly. Transfer errors, even on a single user's account, can snowball into irreparable loss of trust, costing billions.

It's more effective for a bank to start a new brand next to existing services, from the ground up using new software, and that's what a lot of them are doing these days.

How good is good? (Talking about the pay)

You're doing gods work, man.

Also, as a cobol programmer, what do you do?

@rusty-hacker Salaries are very country specific, but older enterprise languages like Cobol, Fortran and Delphi tend to pay 1.5x compared to more common languages like PHP or JS.

In the US that might be $60k vs $90k, in NL €40k vs €60k. Raw salary numbers don't mean much though — all depends on whether it includes hardware, transportation, lunch, pension, healthcare and other insurances, how much tax you pay, how high rents/mortgages are, etc.

@fastidio old COBOL books

@inaba all the banking logic for the mainframes

> COBOL
> 22

You're a unicorn is what you are

For reference, what is the brutto/netto salary in EUR let's say? Because I have no idea how much to think.

@zemaitis 9012,80 Euro/pm which is great in my country

@ttshivhula 9k Euro? or 900

@zemaitis k

You decrypted the COBOL cyphers !? 🤯

@ttshivhula omg 9k per month it's a dream

Your avatar doesn't seem like you😯

@Bijedic I love beard but I just dont have any, fucken annoys me

9k euro wtf. Just started my COBOL job at 29 yrs yesterday :D. I get 2.7k eur/mo but thats standars for all their devs. Will see what happens over time.

@disco pretty sure that 9000 eur per month in south africa was trolling or I didn't understand something.

@disco If you are unsure about salary for your skills in your region, try to find other interested employers, and just go for a talk.

Find out how much they want you to join, and how much they are offering. Don't immediately move for a little more money, company culture and secondary conditions are important as well of course.

Employers are not love partners, you are allowed to flirt around, and build up a network of backups 😉

@zemaitis I'm from South Africa and I can honestly say that 900k euros is absurd Cobol dev or not.

So what’s it like programming in COBOL? I’ve always wondered.