Not a bad thing. One becomes an expert in one niche domain (I wouldn't say COBOL is niche but you know) and comfortable sit on top of it. One can just work maybe 15, 20 years and retire early.
You also need to be aware that there will be massive pressure on businesses to remove your job though. Every single app written in a lanuage that has a diminishing number of people able to work on is a huge risk. The only reason COBOL devs are still able to fine work is because businesses like banks didn't have the foresight to remove that dependency early enough - they've been running their legacy code for far too long and now it's hard to replace. Its unlikely that they'll be keen make the same mistake again.
Yes I understand. But consider two points: 1) People who are familiar with mainframes and COBOL are probably well into their career maturity (at least 40+) and because of the luxury salary they probably do not mind an early retirement, and 2) Even when bank moves it moves slowly.
But I do think that the whole COBOL thing is coming to an end...maybe we need to find something still hot but hated by everyone, for example...Java?
> Its unlikely that they'll be keen make the same mistake again.
Companies learning from their mistakes? Large companies learning from their mistakes? Companies learning from the mistakes made 10-20 years ago by a different CEO/CTO/Leadership team? You believe it companies ability to change more than I do.
