Computer programming is an example of a job where workers of all ages are required. One of the current challenges faced by the computer industry is the need to fill programming positions that maintain legacy languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN. COBOL is a language that was written in 1959.

A poll conducted in 2013 showed that 73% of college instructors teaching information technology classes today do not teach COBOL (Shead, 2013).

Young graduates do not want to learn old languages. They prefer to learn newer programming languages such as Java. However, there is a need for people who can program in COBOL because an estimated 220 billion lines of this code are running many business applications to this day (Hacker-

Rank, 2015). “It would be a herculean feat to replace every single business program with a brand new language without introducing detrimental bugs”

(HackerRank, 2015). Therefore, the cost of replacing the COBOL code has not outweighed the benefits of using this older language. As a result, the average age of COBOL programmers is estimated to be in the fifties, and these programmers can make a good living filling an important need.

Meanwhile, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) also has a need for computer programmers who know FORTRAN. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are still active and will be for many years to come, contain computers that were programmed in these legacy languages. The last Voyager engineer from the original project team that launched the satellites is now retiring, and the person who replaces him on the job will need to have a specific skill set, including maintaining legacy computer programs, in order to service the Voyager crafts (Wenz, 2015).

Discussion Questions:

1. From the information presented here, would you say that age diversity could be considered a source of competitive advantage for a company in the computer industry? Please explain.

2. The computer industry is somewhat well-known for its lack of gender and racial diversity as well as possible ageism. For example, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, received much media attention for saying, “Young people are just smarter” in 2007 at the age of 22 while speaking to a group at Stanford University (Ross, 2013). Do you think the image of lacking diversity and favoring young people presents a strategic business problem for the computer industry?

Why or why not?

3. If you were the CEO of a computer company, what message would you give to your employees, and what types of norms would you set in your organization with respect to diversity? How would you do it?