The Last COBOL Programmer and the End of the World

Some people believe the world will end in fire, others in ice. I believe it will end with the death of the last COBOL programmer.

COBOL is the immortal relic of computing. Born in 1959, it is older than most of the people still typing its keywords today. Banks, insurance companies, governments, and airlines continue to entrust it with the lifeblood of civilization: money, pensions, tickets, and ledgers. The world has changed beyond recognition since COBOL was first compiled, but COBOL itself has not. It is the iron rod buried deep in the foundations of modern society.

The irony is sharp: companies salivate over shiny new buzzwords — cloud-native, microservices, AI-driven. They advertise for “Tech Leads” at salaries that would barely lure a mid-level developer. Yet in the shadows, they quietly post openings for COBOL developers, desperate for anyone who can still remember how to read the hieroglyphics of 1980s payroll systems. They call it legacy. I call it the doomsday clock.

Because here’s the truth: those billions of lines of COBOL code are not going anywhere. Rewriting them is too risky, too expensive, and too politically fraught. A single misplaced decimal in a core banking system could vaporize billions. So the code remains, patched and propped up, humming away like a nuclear reactor from the Cold War era — safe enough until the last technician retires.

And that’s the real apocalypse. Climate collapse will cause chaos, AI may disrupt jobs, geopolitics may spark wars — but society will somehow muddle through. What it will not survive is the day when there is a pension payout due, an airline ticket to issue, or a bank ledger to balance, and the last COBOL programmer is six feet under.

When that day comes, no amount of cloud-native microservice architecture diagrams will matter. Civilization will grind to a halt, not because of the AI uprising, but because nobody knows how to fix a 60-year-old subroutine written in ALL CAPS. The world will end not with a bang or a whimper, but with a DATA DIVISION error.

Until then, job postings like COBOL Developer — Urgent will keep surfacing in inboxes, proof that the end is not yet upon us. COBOL endures, because the system that runs the world still runs on it. And so we wait — not for fire, not for ice, but for the last programmer who can keep the reactor humming.

That’s when the world ends.