The COBOL escape mirage

Like a lot of other devs, sometimes I feel overwhelmed and mentally exhausted by my job. Well it’s not the job itself, it’s what it’s wrapped into: an endless ocean of tools, libs, frameworks, buzzwords and abstractions that keep coming at you. It’s noisy.

So sometimes I surprise myself thinking an outrageous thought:

“Maybe I should become a COBOL dev?”

In this wild wild west that is web dev, the COBOL world seems like a stable, slow and steady heaven. The tech is old and reliable, the dialect is niche and exotic compared to the web lingua frinca. Like a refreshing breeze.

It appears to be a weird equivalent of going off-the-grid, taking care of sheeps in the mountains.

But there’s another appealing side: the projects also seem to shift your horizon, no more superficial stuff, you work on real-world everyday-life high-impact codebases. Banking transactions, insurance contracts, money, transfers, real lives, boom! The real stuff that makes the world tick.

But this is only appealing because it’s something else, it’s the other end of the spectrum, it’s old but so far away from the current job it feels fresh and exciting, but it’s a view of the mind, it’s smoke and mirrors.

It would be better to work in banking or insurance on legacy codebases really? I don’t think so, in this case the grass is not greener.

Instead, it’ll be way more profitable and induce more happiness to focus on the good sides of the current deal.

Living in nature on the other hand…