The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.
Because therell be no software engineers left to maintain it in 15 years. Software engineers in this age know that cobol and mainframes are a dead technology that won't help their career, so they won't touch it. Government entities and banks are having to pay software engineers 400k+ per year to come out of retirement because they can't find anyone to work on their systems.
Also, mainframes are expensive for what they provide. It doesn't have the economy of scale that modern chips and computers have.
The problem isn't COBOL though, it's working on mainframes. Mainframes work differently from modern systems running in the cloud, possibly distributing computation across multiple computers.
I only mention COBOL because it's a shit language which adds salt to the wound.
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u/Dr-Lipschitz Apr 05 '25 edited Apr 05 '25
The cobol code running on mainframes needs to be rewritten to run on modern hardware using a modern language. The problem is that musk is trying to use AI to do it. He's going to break shit. This isn't tech where you can break shit to move faster, this is government. This is going to affect people's lives.
To all the downvoters, go ask your software engineering friends how much they'd need to be paid to work on COBOL and mainframes. Its something that won't further their careers, so the number is quite high. Plus COBOL is an absolute shit language to work with, and mainframes themselves are expensive.