That is absolutely true as well… though this may be just a personal anecdote, it seems to me that the few COBOL coders I once knew would be amongst the most likely to keep a solid documentation of their own systems.
The problem with that though, is that their bosses are almost always too stupid to ask them for such documentation before they leave/retire, or to bother to preserve it when the exiting COBOL programmer gives it to them, because coding is magic to them, and you’re either a good magician that can do the thing, or you’re not.
Upper management / C Suite seems to never understand why the term software engineer was/is used.
My understanding is that even if you learn COBOL, you’d struggle to understand legacy systems since they have their quirks from a bygone era
That is absolutely true as well… though this may be just a personal anecdote, it seems to me that the few COBOL coders I once knew would be amongst the most likely to keep a solid documentation of their own systems.
The problem with that though, is that their bosses are almost always too stupid to ask them for such documentation before they leave/retire, or to bother to preserve it when the exiting COBOL programmer gives it to them, because coding is magic to them, and you’re either a good magician that can do the thing, or you’re not.
Upper management / C Suite seems to never understand why the term software engineer was/is used.