Companies want to pay less to work with COBOL? I was always told you’d get a nice bump to work with COBOL because so few people are still around to maintain these critical systems?
The whole point seems to be to convince people to learnt hat so they don't have to rely on some near-retirement people and also able to pay them less.
Don't think for a second that the software engineering gravy train won't come to a screeching end as soon as supply catches up with demand.
I wouldn't even be surprised if us SE's eventually try to heavily license and gatekeep the industry like law and medicine, loading new workers up with 6 figures of debt and significant post bachelors requirements, in order to keep our salaries artificially high. Medicine in the US seems to be especially damaged by this.
From what I've observed by my conversations with friends and family in medicine, actual physicians increasingly do very little hands on work (with the exception of surgeons) and instead essentially just manage lesser educated technicians, especially RNs and advanced PAs, NPs, and CRNAs, who do the actual work. The physician essentially just stands around and observes but importantly takes most of the legal liability when things inevitably go wrong.
I think this is a huge part of the reason healthcare in the US is so expensive.
Perhaps the future of software engineering will look similar, with principle engineers and architects being like physicians. Extremely well educated, but almost no hands on experience writing code.
Ahh yes, the rest of the non-software companies in the world.
Of course, the pensioning age of those cobolists might give them a reason in the extremely near future ;-)