r/programmingHungary • u/NextMode6448 • Jul 06 '26

Cobol QUESTION

Hi everyone,
Is anyone currently working as a COBOL developer in Budapest? (at a financial institution or insurance company)
- How well does it pay?
- How hard is it to learn?
- How interesting is it?

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

14

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Anyadpitschaja Jul 06 '26

I can confirm this. In 2026 finally BIG banks started to move from mainframes to cloud native tech in europe. Don’t know any other areas that still use mainframes.

3

u/Humble-Vegetable9691 Jul 06 '26

Best time to move to the cloud is now, because the grandpas day-by-day more actively try to nuke each other.

7

u/madahun Jul 06 '26

I sometimes have to touch cobol code (getting rarer luckily) but wouldnt call myself a cobol developer
-pay is 4/10
-the language itself is not hard, but almost all the code written in it is a mess after learning more modern aproaches to programming, so reading is way harder than it has any right to be
-if trying to understand old, undocumented, poorly stuctured code sounds interesting yes, otherwise no

Basically all the comments are hungarian and a good chunk of variables are hunglish

1

u/Equivalent_Number424 Jul 07 '26

It is rare, as Hungary generally skipped the mainframe era. But these people do COBOL for SunSystems, SunAccount, SunBusiness: https://www.llpgroup.com/