Has this been similar to your experience? I'm just curious because it's not a very typical thing, square peg in a round hole sort of situation.
Those same corporations are also not blind to the fact that most of their COBOL workforce will be retiring, en mass, in the coming years, and are quite desperate to hire anyone willing to learn. My employer paid for me to attend a 3 month training program in order to learn how to use and develop on the IBM zSeries mainframe. It was a fantastic experience. As well, those same companies are looking to move as much of their COBOL code off of the mainframe and onto a distributed, server platform. While you can't beat the sheer power of Big Iron chugging along through a batch cycle, the CICS user interface leaves a lot to be desired. It's much more cost and time effective to build a web interface that talks to a Java middle-layer that lives on the mainframe (such that it can directly talk with DB2 or some such), compared to designing, building, and testing a CICS program to do the same thing, yet in a much more ugly fashion.
I'm actually in the process of getting involved with the US Army now (I'm 21) so that I can get some schooling and stuff done later, but I've thought that I might spend my off-time for the next few years trying to self-teach myself NetREXX or something and try to land a job in some MegaCorp. I'm not opposed to writing code all day in a comfy office chair with full benefits etc, especially compared to living in a dorm with couple dudes eating Ramen and trying to conquer Web 4.0 or whatever. Just doesn't appeal to me.
It's reassuring that it's a viable career path, I hadn't thought much about the new generation of mainframe maintenance, but from what my dad has told me about some of the people he's worked with it certainly makes sense that these big corps would be desperate for fresh meat right about now.
Downside of course is COBOL, Java, etc. But it's not like it's going anywhere soon. Nobody really wants to replace millions of lines of COBOL that work, and work well.
Writing a compiler for an ML-ish language that targets COBOL would be kind of amusing. Just because they're stuck with COBOL doesn't mean it has to be hand-written, right?
Disclaimer: I don't work with mainframes but I know people who do. Friend of mine quite likes writing assembly for z/Architecture. I don't know if she's totally sane.
However, rewriting 30+ years of legacy code was very difficult. The place had tried and failed on two occasions so far to do it.
It seemed a bit like the airline reservation software system GDS and how it's still around.
Where I worked people were always saying how they'd like mainframe people and would train them up but when actually asked about training, well, things became quieter.
But mainframe sucks. Nobody gets into it cause the like it, they just need a job. I'd like to see a startup that sells mainframe software, cause they'd be be like one of 3 people.
Retooling all of that is hard, and while avoiding that problem they kind of set themselves up to those legacy problems. Java shops kinda have seen the same thing except that while Java grew with the times, COBOL and friends just stagnated. The world kept turning though, and that's brought us to the situation of these 40 year programmers leaving behind forty years of code that basically only THEY can really understand.