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Depends on what you want to do career-wise, and what's going to make you happy. There are billions of lines of COBOL running out there, doing all the unhip, non-HN, bread and butter IT/MIS types of things that keep the world running (like getting your paycheck right, or processing your insurance claim, or calculating your utility bill). Because many of these applications incorporate decades of tribal knowledge and accumulated tweaks, all the "COBOL needs to die" nonsense in the world will not make them go away in my lifetime, and probably not in yours. And since the cool kids keep hearing that COBOL is the ultimate in looser languages, you are correct that there's a declining pool of COBOL talent. One of my clients even funded the CS department at the local CC so that there would be a COBOL/Mainframe oriented degree track to develop talent. Up side: You'll be in a field with declining talent but not equally declining demand and will generally be able to find a job and be paid well (though don't count on off-the-charts compensation). You'll usually work in mature, stable operational environments at large, established companies. You'll almost always be involved in core business processes, making you less likely to be the subject of cuts when budgets get tight. Down side: There are no COBOL start-up companies; you won't be working on cutting edge stuff. "Modify the taxation calculator to reflect changes in the FY2015 tax code" would be typical projects. Stable also usually == staid & bureaucratic, and if that sort of work environment annoys you, you won't be happy. COBOL is a horrid, ugly language especially if you're used most anything else. COBOL is often tied to IBM Mainframes, so it's somewhat rare to not have to also know something about z/OS, CICS and other IBM-isms. Hipsters and brogrammers will judge you negatively not because of your talent or accomplishments, but because you solved problems with COBOL, instead of their choice of cooler languages (I get this some times having done a fair bit of FORTRAN back in the day by people who ignore how cool the problems we were solving were). So if career stability is important enough to give up on faster paced, more cutting edge environments, then you might give COBOL a go. |