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I wonder how the market for that is now, and how it will be a decade from now. I imagine a lot of the people with significant experience working with COBOL and mainframes are getting older and retiring

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I used to work in a medium sized college town in the midwest that basically had 4 places for software developers to work. The university, the "fun" software company (where I worked), and a couple insurance companies.

We hired a lot of people from the insurance companies and they all basically said that they would hire anyone with a science type degree that was willing to learn COBOL.

Eventually companies will pay people to get up to speed on older technology like RPG and COBOL. For sure, they are fighting it hard, but I don't see a lot of other options. It's harder for me to imagine all of this legacy software being replaced with new code.

It is substantially cheaper to train people and training people in COBOL is easy. Some businesses are starting to realize and even try to encourage IBM to do more to promote their products.

As another user said, allowing people to spin up z/OS would be awesome. As of now, it's not really practical to learn without direct access to mainframes. So all the cost is on the business to train devs. Which is not as important in other dev positions

I actually know a bank with an office close to me that still recruits COBOL developers to maintain some of their old legacy systems, while they slowly transition to newer tech. These people get paid pretty well by the way.

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