The SO Developer Surveys give some info on the job market for COBOL as it appears on the average salary versus years-of-experience graphs, which I like as there's as many stories or reasons as you can think of to explain them.
In 2023 there were 222 respondents who averaged 19 years of experience, and an average salary of $75,500. In 2024 the exact number of respondents is not shown, but likely similar based on the color code of the point, but the average experience had dropped to 17 years.
Elsewhere in the graph my favourite open question is: how come the over 2000 respondents mentioning Swift average over 11 years experience in a language that's only been public for 10 years?
iOS development has been around for quite some time now. Most senior iOS and Cocoa developers probably started with Objective-C before slowly migrating codebases over to Swift.
Interview with Gerard van Belle, director or the Lowell Observatory.
The topic was space/lunar optical interferometers. It's easier to do this on the Moon than in space, as there's no formation flying. He's got a "menu" of projects from a few/small unit telescopes right up to lunar manufacturing like this.
Given that the customer ticked an agree to terms box for the park tickets that likely will be enough for the company to keep the case out of court, why would they feel the need to go with the "stretch" to the streaming agreement terms too?
Could there be some difference in the terms, where the streaming terms have some advantage over the park ticket terms for the company, perhaps?
According to the article on CNN, which has also been submitted to HN, she died after eating at a restaurant in Disney Springs which is a shopping and dining area outside of the ticketed park areas. Anyone can go there to eat or shop without agreeing to any terms or conditions. They are likely throwing everything against the wall hoping something will stick.
I'd say people and businesses that best understand and balance risks against potential rewards are the most successful. I know a couple of skydiving accountants...
Use of innovative tech in finance is one way for companies to gain an "edge" which can make them a lot of money. I wouldn't characterise people working in those particular areas as more risk averse.
OTOH finance businesses (esp. those that manage other peoples money) are regulated and can't put new tech into Production without careful change control. But this evolves over time, and controls were looser in the past.
There's a steady creep of regulation and control into tech used in finance outside and around IT: so called EUC (End-User Computing). This can be a source of "wrong tool for the job" syndrome. I've seen some hellish SQL written by non-IT people, but it got the job done. It's also an area where source code control, testing, and release processes are inevitably more human and error-prone.
There is a culture clash internal to large finance between "move fast and break things!" and "nothing can change, ever - too risky!" This leads to a mixture of the very old and very new, and inevitably, more complexity. Achieving homogeneity once the heterogeneous is out of the bottle is very hard - attempts to do so often (always?) lead to a variation on the xkcd "Standards" situation https://xkcd.com/927/
An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on BBC Radio 4: More or Less [1].
Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course, but simply one of the most informative shows there is.
"By extension, this means that the most important factor determining success is the user experience: the best distributors/aggregators/market-makers win by providing the best experience, which earns them the most consumers/users, which attracts the most suppliers, which enhances the user experience in a virtuous cycle."
Sadly, the reality of the virtuous circle though is: enshittification.
"...from music to video to books to art; the extent to which being “special” meant being scarce is the extent to which the existence of “special” meant a constriction of opportunity"
I don't get this. Rarity or inaccessibility has been used as marketing tool, sure. But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet. Feels like a "never mind the quality, feel the width" view of culture.
"LLMs are breaking down all written text ever into massive models that don’t even bother with pages: they simply give you the answer."
When will people stop saying that? The give an answer, yes, but is it the answer: caveat emptor.
> But great music and books were not scarce for a long time pre-internet.
For some maybe. When I was first learning to program I would drive to the local bookstore and copy down code from books out of their very small tech section. I couldn't afford to buy any of the books at the time (out of the very small selection), and they were too new for the local library to carry. Now, I can learn about almost _anything_ for free within a few clicks.
Music was similarly gated, but more so by lack of money than overall access.
The SO Developer Surveys give some info on the job market for COBOL as it appears on the average salary versus years-of-experience graphs, which I like as there's as many stories or reasons as you can think of to explain them.
In 2023 there were 222 respondents who averaged 19 years of experience, and an average salary of $75,500. In 2024 the exact number of respondents is not shown, but likely similar based on the color code of the point, but the average experience had dropped to 17 years.
Elsewhere in the graph my favourite open question is: how come the over 2000 respondents mentioning Swift average over 11 years experience in a language that's only been public for 10 years?
2024 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/work#salary-comp-total-...
2023 https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/?utm_source=so-owned&ut...