[jes5199]

the "latest technologies" thing is questionable. A COBOL programmer can still charge the highest hourly rate of anyone in the industry, because surviving COBOL programs must be very valuable (or else they would have been replaced.)

In the world where App Academy and the like are churning out iPhone developers, Ruby on Rails programmers, and Javascript (uh, what's the word for person who works in JS?.... ) advocates in eight to twelve weeks doesn't make those sound like skills to hone to get your long-term stability.

Personally, I keep being surprised by how much value there is in just remembering how tech worked in the 1990s and even the early 2000s - Windows and OSX and Linux have changed a lot and iOS and Android seem completely new - but a lot of platform decisions evolved gradually in the changing technical context, and throwback behaviors can seem completely mysterious to someone who's first programming environment was XCode - there's still DOS behaviors hidden in some of these places! I wouldn't be surprised if ye olde mainframe experts had some even subtler knowledge about how-things-really-work-under-there than I do.

[wobbleblob]

A phrase like 'Surviving Cobol programs' suggests you have the wrong idea. The idea that there is dinosaur code from the 1960's still chugging along, and occasionally in need of emergency repair by a highly paid grey haired wizard is a myth. There is still some demand for Cobol programmers because new projects are still being written in Cobol. You'd be surprised about their age as well. Often by smaller to medium sized shops, because they lack the resources to change course and retrain or replace everyone, like the big companies did.

[jes5199]

huh! I've met legacy Cobol maintainers, but I haven't heard of any companies doing new development in it. Do you have links? I'm super-curious to find out more.