It's COBOL isn't it?

After reading the first sentence... Yes it is. It's not like this is a surprise. Banks are some of the worst when it comes to actually replacing outdated shit. Until it fails, and takes their entire business with it of course.

These articles have been written for at least two decades now. This isn't a new issue. The banks just refuse to do what's necessary because it is expensive and they want to keep kicking the can down the road. Eventually that can is gonna fall apart, and the millions to upgrade... Will be a nothing compared to the billions they lose daily after.

I don't think the money is the problem. Because one can always do a shadow or A/B deployment.

I bet it is to do with unreliability of migrations and the general fact that new tech is a bit jank.

My Aunt and Uncle are both retired COBOL programmers who tried to persuade me to pick up the language as they said those mainframes cost a lot and are still running and are not going anywhere for a while.

Also: The newer, the more complex, the more complex the more open to attacks, the more open to attacks the more vulnerable.
I'd choose this approach too. Basically unhackable with totally no backdoors.
If it works, don't fix it.

A woman friend dropped out of IT, to be a full time mom for 14 years. When she was about to start job hunting she told me that Se thought she had become unemployable. She was working at a bank within a week, making mint.

She told me that the primary reason they kept those systems working was that banks and insurance companies could not afford to do a migration where a small mistake could cost billions.

Also, I've done cobol in my day, and it's really good for these kinds of applications.

There's a chance even for you grandchildren to still find employment in COBOL, imo

I had a teacher talk about learning cobol for this reason - 40 years ago.

Mainframes are the shit. They run almost all the financial transactions in the world using old reliable code such as Cobol, Algol, and JCL. They are also extremely hard to hack in comparison to things like servers.

Also, all hardware components are hot-swappable.

They have a lot of built in redundancy.

Lol i can't even code and i knew it was cobol when i read the headline

yeah I agree here. they did in the 90's when a lot had to deal with y2k but I don't think they do much beyond that.