[garethsprice]

It is rare that stacks go away entirely. There's still a bunch of folks in their 70s employed writing COBOL, just as I'm sure there's at least 1 operating blacksmith within driving distance of you. The option to rest up and ride out one stack is there, but yeah the fun new work stops going to that stack.

I went through a similar mid-career burnout where I couldn't face jumping in with the 21 year old fresh grads to ramp up on yet another round of bloated frameworks. Shifting to management was the route out for me where I get to direct high-impact work and provide guard-rails that stop my reports from repeating the mistakes I made. They are all far better programmers than I ever was, and I've been doing it enough years now where it's profoundly satisfying to see my early hires thriving and far surpassing me professionally - while none of the code I wrote even 5 years ago exists any more (another existentially depressing thing about our profession).

If you love coding and want to keep working on green-field stuff, the freelance (contract, consulting, freelance, etc) route might be good for you. Change in this field is inevitable, and only going to get more rapid. You will need to either keep adapting, or find a way to incorporate or shift to something that has more ever-green skills.

[JohnFen]

> There's still a bunch of folks in their 70s employed writing COBOL

Just to underline this, I know devs in their 20s who became proficient in COBOL because an expert COBOL programmer can make crazy money.

[VygmraMGVl]

I know a dev fresh out of college who became proficient in COBOL, got a govt job offer, and now is working as a lifeguard because places that hire COBOL programmers take forever to process their paperwork. Presumably he'll start his real job in late summer when they get their act together.

[spratzt]

Really!!

All the jobs I’ve seen for COBOL programmers paid atrociously bad rates.

[fm2606]

I don't know if I would call it "atrociously" bad rates but a quick scan of Cobol listings on Indeed somewhere between $90K and $110K. I'm sure there are outliers on both sides.

Honestly I feel the rates for all software devs have gone down from a year ago which I am sure has something to do with the massive layoffs from the big companies.