The University of California San Diego has a Cobol problem.
Its three big applications for tracking finance, payroll and students have been running on mainframes since the 1990s. Their Cobol cores are getting old, and the accretion of bolt-on features is fragmenting data and processes and making them brittle and hard to maintain.
Cobol developers aren’t getting any younger, either: Five years ago, their average age was 55. UCSD has nine Cobol developers left, with retirement being the biggest cause of attrition.
