Banking Memes

While everyone's fighting over whether React is better than Vue or if TypeScript is worth the hassle, COBOL developers are just sitting there eating their lunch, completely unbothered, making six figures maintaining banking systems from 1972. The language is older than most developers' parents, yet it still runs 95% of ATM transactions and 80% of in-person transactions. Banks literally can't find enough COBOL programmers, so they're paying obscene amounts to anyone who knows it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are rewriting our apps in the framework-of-the-month for the third time this year. Job security? More like job immortality. Those mainframes aren't going anywhere.

When you're fresh out of bootcamp learning React and TypeScript, then someone casually mentions COBOL and you're like "what's that?" only to watch senior devs collectively lose their minds. For context: COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) was created in 1959 and is still running critical banking systems, insurance companies, and government infrastructure worldwide. We're talking billions of transactions daily on code older than your parents. The problem? Nobody wants to learn it, everyone who knows it is retiring, and banks are desperately clinging to these systems because rewriting them would be like performing open-heart surgery on a patient running a marathon. New programmers see it as ancient history that should be extinct. Banks see it as the immovable foundation of global finance that cannot be destroyed without triggering financial apocalypse. The cognitive dissonance is *chef's kiss*. Fun fact: There are an estimated 220 billion lines of COBOL still in production today. That's roughly 43% of all banking systems. Sleep tight! 💀

The entire financial world runs on COBOL code written when dinosaurs roamed the earth. New programmers see this ancient language and want it burned at the stake, but banks cling to it like Gollum with the precious ring. Why rewrite millions of lines of working code when you can just pay COBOL developers obscene amounts of money instead? The banking industry's motto: "If it's broken enough to work for 60 years, don't fix it."

Young devs want to burn COBOL with fire, but banks cling to it like Gollum's precious. Why? Because those 60-year-old mainframes still process $3 trillion in daily transactions . Try migrating that legacy code and watch your career evaporate faster than VC funding in a recession. The ultimate job security isn't knowing the latest JavaScript framework—it's being the last person alive who remembers how to maintain that ancient COBOL system nobody dares to replace.

Looks like U.S. Bank just shipped the most valuable thing in programming—absolutely nothing! They're proudly announcing they've shipped null , complete with tracking capabilities. Sure, go ahead and track that non-existent card. Reminds me of those times when the backend team promises to deliver "something" by Friday, and then sends an empty JSON object. At least they're honest about shipping nothing instead of pretending it's a "feature-light release." The best part? Null is apparently "on its way" to an address they have "on file"—which probably means it'll arrive exactly never to precisely nowhere.

When your bank is clearly run by developers who forgot to replace placeholder values. "Your null has been shipped" is what happens when someone's database query fails silently and the template just rolls with it. That poor null value is now traveling through the postal system, desperately searching for the address they have "on file." Good luck tracking that card—it exists in the void between undefined and non-existent. At least they were kind enough to let you know about their spectacular failure!

Somewhere in Nebraska, a lone COBOL developer is literally holding up the digital world like Atlas himself. While tech bros brag about their microservices architecture, this unsung hero is silently preventing the financial apocalypse with code older than most developers' parents. Banks don't send thank you cards for averting economic collapse every Tuesday at 2 AM when the batch job mysteriously fails. The real infrastructure isn't in the cloud—it's in Nebraska, running on a language that uses "PIC X(30)" to define a string because it was cool in 1959.