[albroland]

I've discussed it on HN previously, but out of college I took a position doing development on IBM zOS mainframes writing HLASM and COBOL. When I left that company after two years (around 2014), I was making roughly 75k. The salary bands I saw capped at about 120k. I moved to NYC and joined an A stage startup and instantly was making 110k as a junior working on a rails stack with zero experience. In the following years I'd proceed to continue getting substantial compensation increases, where everyone I know in mainframe land still appears capped ~100-120k.

So, frankly speaking, there is plenty of demand but it does not pay anywhere close to market rate for US based engineers.