Then, he suggests, the CIO should bring in young programmers who may be working in other parts of the firm but know modern programming languages, understand mobile and Web to work with mainframe programmers.

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While COBOL has not gone away at the banks, more and more of the technical staff spend their time programming new features and interfaces in modern languages and web application frameworks that provide highly applicable and transferable skills to startups only too happy to hire them for their technical training and domain experience.

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