Financial systems Memes

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.