Specifically for the financial sector and especially banks and government tax departments, they’re on a clock.
As time moves on, there are less COBOL engineers. Hell, sometimes their systems have been written in a bespoke language. There is less and less understanding of why something is set up the way it is due to lack of documentation. Updates / changes to the code sometimes have to wait for 2-3 years because the system isn’t flexible enough (literally, not as in “this change will take 2-3 dev years”). Even code that old contains bugs, but due to the age of the code they’re inscrutable.
However, whichever new system gets tooled up has to be 99.999% flawless, or it could cause serious damage to the bank and even its regional market.
When there is that kind of pressure, dev teams are no longer considered a cost sink, money flows, and the world is possible.
As time moves on, there are less COBOL engineers. Hell, sometimes their systems have been written in a bespoke language. There is less and less understanding of why something is set up the way it is due to lack of documentation. Updates / changes to the code sometimes have to wait for 2-3 years because the system isn’t flexible enough (literally, not as in “this change will take 2-3 dev years”). Even code that old contains bugs, but due to the age of the code they’re inscrutable.
However, whichever new system gets tooled up has to be 99.999% flawless, or it could cause serious damage to the bank and even its regional market.
When there is that kind of pressure, dev teams are no longer considered a cost sink, money flows, and the world is possible.