[Nextgrid]

There's nothing particularly difficult about Cobol, it can be learned, and with enough effort, all the undocumented existing code can be understood and reverse-engineered enough to be able to make changes. It's not pleasant work, but it's doable.

If there was value in it, salaries/consulting rates would reflect it and people would be queuing up to learn it and make good money. That isn't happening, so it seems like Cobol devs aren't actually that valuable to these companies.

[andyjohnson0]

There was a comment on HN a while back to the effect that the well-known stories of COBOL devs being dragged out of retirement to earn massive consulting payments was a myth. They were actually being paid good, but not extremely good, rates for their knowledge of the business logic embedded in old code-bases. The implementation language was largely irrelevant.