Early in my career, I met a few COBOL developers who came out of retirement in the run-up to January 2000, getting paid $300+ per hour to remediate Y2K bugs when nobody else was left who knew COBOL.

Suspect a similar trajectory for highly-skilled, well-rounded "pre-AI" engineers

Justin Searls

COBOL developers came out of retirement before Y2K, earning $300+ per hour to fix bugs when few knew the language. A similar trajectory may await highly-skilled pre-AI engineers as AI transforms the industry and legacy systems require maintenance from those who understand traditional software development.

Early in my career, I met a few COBOL…