Your firm pays his company $216k a year. He probably sees 1/3 to 1/2 of that, maybe less. I'm not in software but that seems low doesn't it

$900/day is $225,000/year.

Or about $112.50/hour.

But this is what your company pays as Corp-to-Corp, to his company.

His gross pay is significantly less. Maybe at $65/hour. So his annual pay might only be $130,000/year.

And while this is decent pay, for middle class wages, it is not really very impressive.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/cobol-programming-vscode is one place to start. :)

If you're done that, I presume there's also https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/ibm-z-mai... though it's starting to feel even more like marketing after seeing all that.

There’s also https://github.com/openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-co... which IIRC is an IBM backed open source course.

I'm working on learning COBOL for IBM i, and to do so, I picked up a server that runs it on eBay (€500), learned to install it, then started reading the IBM documentation[1]

You can skip the hardware purchase by joining the IBM i Hobbyists discord[2]; there are a decent number of people with machines who are happy to give out accounts (myself included)

IBM i is a lesser used platform for COBOL, though; the main one is IBM mainframes (aka MVS and z/OS). To get started there, you could try Master the Mainframe (I don't have a link handy, sorry) or tk4[3], and get support from the Mainframe discord[4]. I'm focusing on IBM i because I found it significantly easier to get started, and the platform itself has a really unique design that I was interested in learning about.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/rza...

[2] https://discord.gg/s5xs5ceW26

[3] http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/

[4] https://discord.gg/XFrzjs2ydP

Download and install the GnuCOBOL compiler. Go through some of the many tutorials on the web. ????. Profit.

Next up: learning Ada.