The language of mainframes is as durable as Big Iron
Thirty years ago, the COBOL programming language was dead and buried as an artifact of history… along with the mainframes this language was created for. Back then, nobody envisioned that the mainframe would still be powering all of the world’s most important industries, or that coding in COBOL would be an evergreen skill. But as government and banking systems continue to experience increasing demand for processing power, we remember that these organizations run on mainframes — just another instance where knowing how to code in COBOL means always having a job!
The truth is, mainframes aren’t called “Big Iron” just because the servers are large and heavy. Despite pundits spending decades declaring that everyone would have to rip and replace their mainframes in order to stay “modern”, these systems have proven incredibly resilient and useful. They remain the ideal platforms for the high-volume, high-security processes that power every vertical from finance to the sciences to government agencies. And about 80% of the programs that run on all of these mainframes, across all these industries, are written in COBOL.
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language) is one of the oldest high-level coding languages: its development was kicked off in 1959 by the United States Department of Defense to create a common business language. Sixty six years later, COBOL remains in heavy use at companies like UPS, Cigna, IBM, and more. But while COBOL remains useful – and even invaluable – for companies that rely on mainframes, it can be difficult to find COBOL coders today because most universities pivoted away from teaching it beginning in the 1980s.
As a business-oriented language, COBOL is ideal for business applications, and for the powerful mainframes that run large enterprises. But because COBOL is not ideal for programming a personal computer, it fell out of favor in programming education. This led to a brain drain where the professionals who were best qualified to mentor tomorrow’s COBOL coders simply aged out of the industry and past their prime teaching years. In short, COBOL became “terminally unhip.”
As a result, in 2025 COBOL expertise is becoming invaluable, both to program systems that run critically important organizations, and to mentor the people who will program the COBOL-based systems of the future. More and more software engineers are realizing that this left-for-dead language may be their ticket to lucrative careers. As long as Big Iron endures (and mainframes don’t seem to be going anywhere) some of the most important and prestigious industries in the world will need professionals to understand COBOL – and to train the next generation to do so, as well.