COBOL moves $3 trillion a day in 2026.
In April 2020, with unemployment claims exploding, the governor of New Jersey stood at a podium during a global emergency and asked for something nobody had on their pandemic bingo card: volunteer COBOL programmers.
The state's benefits system โ written decades before most of the engineers reading this were born โ was buckling under 1,600% more traffic. The people who understood it had retired.
Everyone laughed.
Then the system held.
Every few months, a story rips through engineering Twitter about a bank that spent billions on a modern rewrite and crawled back to the mainframe. It goes viral because every engineer suspects it's true.
The piece checks the receipts. Which are documented? Which are folklore?
12-min read:
COBOL still moves $3 trillion a day while modern rewrites keep blowing up. The verified numbers, the migrations that failed, and theโฆ
