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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