The site also says:
"Replacement costs for COBOL systems, estimated at $25 per line, are in the
hundreds of billions of dollars."
"There are 90,000 COBOL programmers in North America in 2002. Over the next four
years there will be a 13% decrease in their number due to retirement and death."
Lines per day published elsewhere are usually 12. (FWIW, shops I managed
averaged 50 lines per day.) Taking 12 lines * $25 / 8 hours = $37.50 per hour.
That's reasonable.
Taking 15% of 4.6B lines / 3 years / 250 days per year / 82K programmers = 11.3
lines per day. Check.
I earlier estimated 40,000 mainframe COBOL programmers in the US. The 82,000
figure given here looks better because it's corroborated by the other numbers.
Further, 82,000 COBOL programmers / 600,000 total US programmers = 13.7%, which
agrees with the 15% distribution by language.
Canada's population is 9% of North America (US + Canada). I adjusted the number
of programmers and lines by .91 to simplify comparison with US statistics.
The Web site goes on to say, without corroboration:
"The most highly paid programmers in the next ten years are going to be COBOL
programmers."
Why? The price of most human labor is determined in the same way as other
commodities -- by supply and demand. It is not based on some imagined measure of
worth or difficulty (excepting executives). Let's look at the demand side.
Computerjobs.com, which provides handy statistics, categorizes as Legacy 500 /
12,000 = 4% of openings. Some of the 12,000 'technology' jobs are
non-programmers, optimistically as many as half, so 8%. DICE.com shows 550=COBOL
/ 7,000=(developer or programmer) = 8%. Monster.com returns nearly identical
numbers.
Why is the demand for COBOL 8% rather than 15%? Because COBOL programmers stay
in their jobs longer than average? Because companies using COBOL, generally
large old-line ones, are creating jobs more slowly than average?
