[ecshafer]

I worked at one of the big financial corps where we were built on top of IBM DB2 with plenty of Cobol and JCL. Almost every team had 1-3 Cobol or "Data" programmers as we said embedded in them. If you needed to get or store data, it involved writing Cobol store procedures, and calling them from Java. There was also a lot of mainframe code running batch jobs that did a lot of critical work. this was from 2016-2021 so its pretty recent.

Cobol devs were on average a bit older (on average id say 10-15 older than the rest of the devs), mainly because there weren't many college grads going in, and like your advisor had said there was a split between cobol and non-cobol devs with very little overlap.

The majority of the cobol devs seemed to fall into a few camps. There were people who graduated in the 80s or 90s and just kept doing the same thing. There was also a large amount of Eastern Europeans that had immigrated in the 90s / 2000s and were cobol devs. Then there were also a decent amount of Indian contracting companies (TCS and the like) which seem to also train people in Cobol even today to hire as contractors.