[albroland]

I'd say you've heard very wrong. If your concern is maximizing your income I'd highly recommend not going the mainframe route. The only people commanding SF/NYC gargantuan salaries will be old guard who retired to do contracting and get brought on to un-fuck situations at incredibly high rates under short term contract. IME you're likely to see MAYBE 80-100k as a midlevel COBOL dev as you're competing primarily against offshored pay - I would expect bootcamp front end devs to make as much or more than COBOL devs.

Also as others have insinuated, COBOL itself isn't a challenge (nor PL1 or HLASM or any other language really), it's the zOS/360 mainframe environment, understanding the nuance behind how all these disparate systems work together, being a JCL wizard, knowing all the IBM yellow books off the top of your head from 40 years of working in the industry, understanding how to use IBM IMS db efficiently, etc. Also the entire ecosystem of stuff you might take for granted, like IDEs/debuggers/deployment/etc, are all quite ancient on zOS systems and take years to get proficient in.