COBOL Brain Drain???

Taken from: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225079/Brain_drain_Where_Cobol_systems_go_from_here_?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2012-03-14

The article noted: "David Brown is worried. As managing director of the IT transformation group at Bank of New York Mellon, he is responsible for the health and welfare of 112,500 Cobol programs -- 343 million lines of code -- that run core banking and other operations. But many of the people who built that code base, some of which goes back to the early days of Cobol in the 1960s, will be retiring over the next several years.

"We have people we will be losing who have a lot of business knowledge. That scares me," Brown says. He's concerned about finding new Cobol programmers, who are expected to be in short supply in the next five to ten years. But what really keeps him up at night is the thought that he may not be able to transfer the deep understanding of the business logic embedded within the bank's programs before it walks out the door with the employees who are retiring."

Cobol might not be 'sexy' - but it does exist - and this article suggests for one company 343 MILLION lines of code!!!  That is a lot of brain power that went into creating that code for business processing.  And ... now more and more of those experts are retiring.

There is obviously a question for academics - teach Cobol - forget Cobol; and for companies - start having Cobol classes?