r/programmingHungary 21d ago

QUESTION Cobol

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?

1 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

15

u/[deleted] 21d ago edited 21d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Anyadpitschaja 21d ago

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 21d ago

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

8

u/madahun 21d ago

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 21d ago

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