Yeah, I programmed in COBOL for 15 years on Unix systems... so I don't have any mainframe experience... I'm pretty good with the actual COBOL code, but as people have said, that's only a piece of it. Working with the environment, such as IBM mainframes, is a big piece. Which is sort of odd, because COBOL was supposed to be "common"...
Presumably these platforms have also lived on though. I think I remember reading about a Fujitsu contract to maintain a big U.K. government ICL derived system?
There isn't the work on the market for any of those and from my experience of working with on their contracts, they will all be tuped existing staff.
As an aside I still have a zero-day for ICL mainframes running Gerorge that's decades old now and taking to my grave.
Interesting - thanks. Won’t get fixed now. I’m guessing all emulated and running on x64 by now.