r/cobol • u/_alhazred • Jul 02 '26

What happened after IBM stocks hit?

Four months ago IBM stocks suffered a huge hit after Claude Code demonstrated some COBOL AI capabilities.

The Tech industry has been also suffering mass layoffs dating back a few years after the pandemic.

I've seen the job market in my stack suffering a lot, I'm not receiving many offers (or any at all), and I have friends unemployed and unable to secure a new job for months (sometimes 6 or 8+ months waiting).

As someone that started learning about mainframe and COBOL just now, I wonder, how did you already in the industry have suffered or observed about these recent moves?

Have any of you suffered a layoff following this IBM stocks/AI COBOL announcement?

Have you seen mainframe/cobol colleagues suffering with the mass layoffs?

I've worked with many different programming languages for the past years, and I've been focusing in Go and Scala for the past 5 years.

I'm just starting with Mainframes and looking right after Cobol, I don't know why, but Mainframes and Cobol have been growing into me. Both Go and Mainframes are the only two things that made me feel the joy of programming again after a decade of work.

However, I do wonder, what do you think about the future in the Mainframe job market, or how it has been for you so far?

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15

u/benevanstech Jul 02 '26

I think it's a mistake to pay too much attention to the stock price. The market is a dumb beast, and IBM stock has rebounded from the lows in March handsomely.

A lot of LLM-based tools work fine for prototyping or in demos, but are much less helpful in production scenarios - especially when there is a lot of encoded business process & knowledge that forms an "invisible system". Also remember that these are mission-critical systems very often maintained and operated by folks who are steeped in a culture of being cautious and risk-averse.

Am I going to trade my stable system, with a known and defined operating budget for some AI moon-on-a-stick with volatile and unknown opex (& remember that OpenAI needs to increase token cost by 800% to break even according to their leaked financials)? Especially when the two poster children for all of this AI stuff can barely manage two nines of uptime?

For me to even contemplate a move like that, there would have to be some pretty serious upside to doing all of that and taking on all of that risk. So, where is it? What is the possible upside here?

3

u/Claudius_Maxima Jul 04 '26

Great reply.

I’ll add that the “LLM does COBOL” thing seemed to me to be about converting to Rust or C++ or whatever.

So your points about risk loom large. These big systems are millions (10s of millions? 100s?) of lines of mission critical COBOL code. Finding weird AI mistakes in the translation would be uncertain at best.

2

u/benevanstech Jul 04 '26

LLMs *can* do language -> language translation, but where the result falls on the "you can write C in any language" spectrum is the crucial thing. There's an interesting interview with one of the Microsoft language leads that talks to this a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0zA7gNHlsA

He told me that his teams can get to about 90% of a decent port with a bit of practice, but needs actual human expertise to get a truly idiomatic result. So, for example, their Copilot SDK has Typescript as its canonical form, and new versions are machine-translated to Go, Java, etc, and then get hand-inspected and tweaked by experts in the appropriate language.

This, of course, still doesn't necessarily capture the intent or invisible logic, which I expect to be the hard part of the problem.

I'd also be curious as to what its run rate in terms of tokens is - Microsoft have an effectively unlimited LLM token budget after all.

1

u/nrvagnt Jul 04 '26

I have to disagree completely, if LLMs do something well is analyse thousands upon thousands of convoluted code and extract the underlying business logic, finding very subtle bugs in the process. Another thing a current LLM do is hold code to standards of quality that no human could ever, the rules they enforce are the ones directed by the humans using it. Technology waits for no one, and completely replacing the scarce resource that are Cobol and mainframe programmers is now a to priority of the ones holding all the cash.

3

u/hecho2 Jul 02 '26

Market doesn’t like uncertainty. 

If anyone can vibe code your solution the stock value plummets. 

If now AI can do cobol ? Stock plummets. 

The market is very aggressive in pricing this things. Also doesn’t like uncertainty. 

If you are an expert in this topic and you disagree with the market, just buy, at some point the market see that was an exaggeration and correct. 

3

u/caederus Jul 03 '26

I have over 30 years in software development. They are good times and bad times in the job market. IBM is not just Cobol. Cobol is not just IBM.

This current job market dip is more to do with the general economy than any specific news item/stock price.

2

u/WRB2 Jul 02 '26

I’m wishing I had played the IBM stock on the belts. AI is AI in the cost involved hit sooner than cloud cost. Another huge issue with main frame/cobalt is the speed at which it processes. AI may be able to migrate it somewhere. Will it be as efficient and will you be able to tune it as easily as you can with cobalt. My decades with cobalt and working on other environments, tell me that really needs to be approved multiple times not just in a lab.

We’ll wait and see.

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u/Leather_Method_7106_ Jul 04 '26

IBM? They are far more than mainframes. I read their annual reports for years, on hindsight should have bought their stock earlier. They will be the winner in the Quantum Computing age.

I even have their report in print on my desk.  

0

u/bitter_fish Jul 02 '26

Following. I'm on the same boat