Java and, to a lesser degree, C#, seem to have joined COBOL in the list of “forever languages”. Unless financial institutions trust LLMs to rewrite them in newer languages (and finds that cost-effective), there is no way that humongous corpus of business-critical software will ever be ported.
I'm told COBOL itself doesn't actually. It's not hard to learn and lots of cheap workers in India will do it for you. The job security is knowing the mainframe tech stack in general, and the specific ways it's used in specific institutions that don't have good internal docs.
