Right. I grew up hearing that COBOL and Fortran devs would become extinct and extremely valuable in my lifetime.
Either it’s a really easy language to learn or the banks used to invest much more in teaching it than they do now (= zero).
If COBOL is so domain-specific, why not teach it as such on the job? Why is it the public’s fault for not investing in it?
Very few companies invest in training these days. They expect schools and colleges to teach some professional skills (this is not what they should be doing) and invest as little as possible in new hires, specially for technical jobs.
That's what my comment was saying. According to the article, the banks used to pay for their staff to learn COBOL on the job. It's 100% the financial industries fault that they have allowed this situation to arise. Why did that practice stop? I think this is one of the areas where capitalism is slowly failing in recent decades.
As it requires a deep understanding of how the monolith works and its connections to other applications, it usually needs to be done in conjunction with the support team which may be outsourced too.