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Lucrative? No, but someone has to maintain the legacy nightmare. Most mainframe developers (i've run into) are very close to retirement age, so companies are trying to hire younger talent and will often put them through paid mainframe programming classes.

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.

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I've had similar ideas, and I've tossed a couple back and forth to my Dad but the problem that I've always run into is that it is REALLY hard to sell those sort of solutions to companies already locked-in to COBOL and Rexx and PL/I, etc.

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.

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