Skip to content

The Latin of software code flourishes

    Caitlin Mooney is 24 years old and in love with technology that dates back to the days of Sputnik.

    Mooney, a recent computer science graduate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is a fan of technologies popular half a century ago, including computer mainframes and the software called COBOL that powers them. That stuff won’t earn cool points in Silicon Valley, but it’s essential technology at major banks, insurance companies, government agencies, and other big institutions.

    During Mooney’s job search, potential employers saw her expertise and wanted to talk about higher positions than she was seeking. “They would get really excited,” Mooney told me. She is now trying to choose between several vacancies.

    The resilience of decades-old computer technologies and the people who specialize in them shows that new technologies are often based on a lot of old technology.

    When you deposit money using your bank’s iPhone app, it’s likely that behind the scenes computers are the offspring of the computers used in the Apollo moon missions. (Also, half-century-old computer code is baked into iPhone software.)

    It is often seen as a problem or a punchline that so much stale technology still exists. But it’s not necessarily a problem.

    “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” joked Ellora Praharaj, director of reliability engineering at Stack Overflow, an online forum popular with techies. “Students who don’t go to school these days don’t necessarily want to work in uncool older languages. But the reality of the world is that this is the power of many of our existing systems.”

    Praharaj said she learned COBOL in college in the mid-2000s and “hate hated it.” But until about five years ago, she regularly used a 1950s computer programming technology called Fortran in a former job in the financial services industry. The old stuff is everywhere.

    Latin is dead, but old computer programming languages ​​like COBOL live on.

    The typical salary for a COBOL programmer has risen 44 percent in the past year to nearly $76,000, according to a Stack Overflow pay survey. The self-reported fee is lower than that for people using trendy software languages ​​like Rust at $87,000, but it was the largest dollar increase in the survey.

    (For the data buffs among us, Stack Overflow said the survey had a significant sample size, but wasn’t necessarily representative.)

    All of this also shows that computer geeks are subject to fundamental supply and demand dynamics. Not many people like Mooney want to work on mainframes and COBOL; the constant need for their skills gives them power. A job hunter who wants “real” COBOL experience recently wrote on the tech bulletin board Hacker News: “COBOL developers are a specialized niche these days and they are paid accordingly.”

    Of course, it would be hard to find anyone who believes that Boomer technologies are the next big thing. Most university computer science programs do not focus on mainframes, COBOL or Fortran.

    Year Up, an organization that trains young adults for technology jobs, told me it has discontinued training in COBOL. Potential employers asked Year Up to focus its curriculum on newer and more widely used software programming languages, such as Java and Python.

    Some people with years of experience in older technology say they worry they’ve lost jobs with more potential.

    But computer science specialists told me that while they wouldn’t advise young people to devote themselves entirely to old technologies, they can provide a useful foundation. Inevitably, today’s hot coding fads will be replaced by something new. The most important skill is to learn how to keep learning, says Jukay Hsu, chief executive of Pursuit, a technical workforce training company.

    Mooney became curious about computer programming while taking business courses at a community college. She said she started doing her accounting homework in Python “for fun.” When she took a course taught by a professor who specialized in COBOL, Mooney found she liked it. She also felt welcomed by a community of computer mainframe die-hards eager to help a young novice.

    “It was really great building my confidence and skills,” said Mooney.

    The irony is that COBOL’s designers never expected the software to last this long. As my colleague Steve Lohr wrote in an obituary for Jean Sammet, a COBOL designer, the software’s pioneers expected it to be a useful workaround until something better came along.

    That was about 40 years before Mooney was born. The old stuff will probably be there in 40 years.

    • How the war plagued Russia’s “coolest company”: At Yandex — Google’s Russian equivalent mixed with Amazon, Spotify and Uber — employees and executives are divided on how to handle Russia’s demands to rid the internet of the truth about the war in Ukraine, my colleague Neil MacFarquhar reported.

    • An overhyped technology finds its groove: 3D printers that spew out layers of material to form objects were once envisioned as technology for our homes. Steve Lohr wrote that 3D printing may hold the most promise for mass-produced products, such as a complex part needed to cool computer processors.

      In related news from Kevin Roose’s 2021 Good Tech Awards: Using 3D printing to tackle the housing crisis.

    • “Nobody knows how to watch movies anymore.” What just happened? I was distracted by a TikTok notification. Wired pondered what we gain and lose by watching movies at home or on our phones. (A subscription may be required.)

    In southwestern Australia, a western spiny gecko sleeps in a nesting box with an opossum family. Scientists were surprised that they all get along.