Current State

Despite its age, COBOL is still widely used in industries such as banking, finance, and government. Many of these organizations rely on COBOL-based applications to handle mission-critical business processes, and migrating away from COBOL can be a difficult and expensive proposition. However, the demand for COBOL programmers has been declining for years, as younger developers tend to focus on newer programming languages. This has led to a shortage of skilled COBOL programmers, and many large organizations have had to hire retired or near-retirement age developers to maintain their existing COBOL-based applications.

Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of COBOL in maintaining critical business processes. In some cases, state governments have had to mobilize retired COBOL programmers to update their unemployment insurance systems in order to cope with the surge in claims caused by the pandemic.