Risk-averse programming

In my experience,  there are a lot of COBOL programmers who don't give a damn about programming either as an art form or as scientific discipline (take your pick).  They spend their days attending endless meetings with business users trying to tease out system requirements from endless discussions that go round and round forever....   At the end of  each day, they don't sign on to comp.lang.cobol to debate the merits of Sections vs Paragraphs.  To them, programming is a just a chore that they have to do in order to get the end result the user wants.

Generally, business programmers are given the following objectives from their manager (in order of importance):

1. Don't screw up
2. Deliver it on time
   
3. Deliver what the user wants
   

From the users, they get the following objectives:

1. Don't screw up
2. Deliver what I want
3. Deliver it on time
   

I think this breeds a very conservative, risk-averse programmer, for whom avoidance of error is the primary concern.  Don't tell him/her about EVALUATE, he/she knows that nested IFs work.