I took three years of it in community college and could probably pick it up again in a hurry. If I did pick it up again, I could probably easily double my current (very reasonable) salary.
But I'll be damned if I go back to writing COBOL, and I know a great many programmers like myself who feel the same way. And (modesty aside for a second here) they tend to be the better programmers.
So you're left with the "for-the-paycheque" programmers writing COBOL, and the programmers who couldn't find a job they cared about more.
That's who's going to be rewriting all those mission-critical COBOL apps once people want to start expanding into more modern languages.
I took three years of it in community college and could probably pick it up again in a hurry. If I did pick it up again, I could probably easily double my current (very reasonable) salary.
But I'll be damned if I go back to writing COBOL, and I know a great many programmers like myself who feel the same way. And (modesty aside for a second here) they tend to be the better programmers.
So you're left with the "for-the-paycheque" programmers writing COBOL, and the programmers who couldn't find a job they cared about more.
That's who's going to be rewriting all those mission-critical COBOL apps once people want to start expanding into more modern languages.