I have a close relative at one of the biggest COBOL shops in the US, and something tells me we're about to find out how we take the stability of our payments infrastructure for granted.

Their company no problem grinding older developers into retirement for the sake of padding their quarterly numbers, work-life balance is hell there. They refuse to try to compete with the modern developer market, senior level pay tops out around $125k. Despite what you may have read about experienced COBOL developer pay, know that is not the average experience. The talent pool was not replenished because they did not want to pay, overseas contracting firms also stopped training COBOL developers because their contractors could earn more building modern infra on AWS, so now they're between a rock and a hard place.

I have little doubt that we are going to see a massive payments infra failure as a result of this. Not because the AI is inherently bad, but because the promises of the tech combined with terrible management practices will create the perfect conditions for a catastrophe.

> how we take the stability of our payments infrastructure for granted.

I was about to comment we should all closely watch those bank statements and balances...

While I'm OK with the use of AI to understand the COBOL codebase, I understand it's a single prompt away from transformation and production. Just one executive approval away ha.