[Nimi]

I have to wonder: there are very competent "old technology/mainframe" programmers. They debugged complex programs using very primitive tools when we were all in diapers. Obviously, there are also very mediocre old programmers, but for the sake of this discussion, consider the best practitioners of their generation.

How is it that they mostly find themselves stuck in horrible jobs, maintaining legacy software on their old platforms? Surely, for a programmer with experience in assembly and Basic (as an example), becoming proficient in most modern languages shouldn't be a problem. But I strongly suspect that even the minority of the old programmers who bother learning a new language, can't find employment utilizing their new knowledge. Any thoughts?

[memracom]

Lots of these guys learned new languages like C aeons ago and have since moved to Java, Scala, Python, etc. The folks who are stuck maintaining legacy COBOL apps are there because they want to be there. The very competent people quickly learn how to use new tools, but can still deep dive and find bugs related to memory leaks and race conditions when it is needed. At the same time, these old guys are likely to demand that everyone around them use TDD so that they don't introduce that kind of bug in the first place. Case in point, Uncle Bob.