Probably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy.
Their strategy is to
- fire everyone,
- give product to very small but ambitious team of people
- cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community)
- use every possible dark pattern exist to get every penny from the users
I am working as a Software engineer in a European bank. There is a huge multi year program to remove COBOL as much as possible with cloud based Java Spring application.
The main reason is maintainability. There is no more cobol developers coming. Existing ones close to retirement or already retired.
You’re describing the pattern we’re seeing across most companies who are still on COBOL.
The shortage of COBOL engineers is real but the harder problem is enterprise scale system understanding. Most modernization efforts stall not because COBOL is inherently a difficult language, but because of the sheer scale and volume of these enterprise codebases. It's tens of thousands of files, if not millions, spanning 40+ years with a handful of engineers left or no one at all.
We're exploring some of this work at Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/, YC-backed) if you're curious to learn more.
With the current reasoning models, we now have the capability to build large scale agentic AI for mainframe system understanding. This is going beyond line-by-line code understanding to reason across end-to-end system behavior and capturing institutional knowledge that’s otherwise lost as SMEs retire.
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