this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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your paycheck is $5000 because you know COBOL
Pretty sure that knowing COBOL isn't the hard part. It has relatively few language concepts.
This lack of language concepts just makes it difficult to reason about it, so that's what you're getting a paycheck for. Well, and possibly also because it might take months to have a new dev figure out your legacy codebase, so it's cheaper to keep the current dev by paying them competitive prices.
Per day.
Not quite. More like per 40 hour week with no overtime, but my father insists on having up to 20 hours a week of overtime he's allowed to burn, so it's kinda like $7,500 a week. He generally gets paid byweekly or monthly. Subcontractor and all that BS
that's why it's $7500.
COBOL. That's why he's a subcontractor. Not like they taught COBOL in my CS courses in university in 1998-2002.
What? I make that kind of money by dabbling in Ansible, Python and Kubernetes. $5000 sounds pretty lowball for fairly niche knowledge like COBOL.
*sigh* why the fuck didn't I major in CS!?
I don't know, but for me it was undiagnosed ADHD. 😋 Fortunately IT is one of the areas where lack of a degree isn't a showstopper.
i mean i recently did a contract gig updating a 6 year old legacy codebase in a language I've never used
oh also I've barely coded anything in my life
you guessed it, i used an LLM (as the contracter requested, but still...) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
so i keep waffling between "my (then) undiagnosed ADHD would have stunted my CS learning hard enough that I'd barely be any more knowledgeable than I am now anyway" and "despite it being a terrible fucking idea companies are going to try their damnedest to replace all software engineering with vibe coding"
so i end up back at "at least i have a degree in pipetting and can go get a $20/hr job moving small volumes of liquid back and forth until pipetting robots become cheaper than me"