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Comment by murph-almighty | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular answer: anything that's about to become legacy. See COBOL programmers.

Almost always there will be less opportunities of that niche in the future; and it is probably difficult to get promoted (or build a career) on the basis of a technology that will be replaced in the long run.

Maybe if you have software project management skills (complex migrations from legacy tech X to modern Y), these might be transferable skills.

Agree: anything that's going to become legacy will still need maintainance. Specially if it can be dockered and run anywhere because it will remain alive for a looooooong time.

COBOL salaries and contract rates aren't very high.

I’ve read numbers as high as USD$500/h.

That is not typical from my quick search. Here's one offering $55-$60 / hour. https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=146e781319019963&from=se...

In other words: Java? :)

Java is going nowhere.

Especially with Oracle in charge eh!

Many mlocs of existing enterprise Java code aren’t going anywhere either (and nor are the poor souls who maintain it all).

Kind of where I was nudging in my comment, though I realize I probably should have been more verbose than just pointing to COBOL.

I worked an internship about 4 years ago in a state government IT role, they were using JSP and Websphere just as Java 8 was being released.

With that said- I don't think Java is dying any time soon, it's too good at articulating business logic for us to just toss it by the wayside. I'm thinking more along the lines of "hot Java framework from 5 years ago". If Spring starts to head towards legacy status, I'd expect that to become the hot "legacy job".

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