Recently, Joseph Steinberg noted that the governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to assist in updating or fixing business applications being used by the state for unemployment applications. I last wrote about this in June 2019 , after seeing an article about COBOL expertise being still in demand by financial institutions. I decided to look and see if there were any resources available for someone to get familiar with COBOL. It turns out that Micro Force is a company that has up-to-date COBOL development environments and compilers, OpenSource.com lists several compilers available (gnuCOBOL seems to be the significant one (documentation here)), and there is a beginning COBOL programming book available from Apress. Looks like there may be some opportunity here (at least according to Indeed.com ….).
@AndySylvester I think the IRS could also use some help with COBOL.
@Ron yes, I think that is another area that has lots of old COBOL applications. I have not done any programming in COBOL, but I knew a science teacher who was a programming buff who did Y2K COBOL consulting as a side job.
@AndySylvester We had COBOL as one of the two major programming languages in higher Ed as late as the early 90’s, and I know people got jobs programming in COBOL later, even after Y2K.
@odd interesting, thanks for the info