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> What’s left behind are opaque, black box systems with almost no one who understands how they work.

Maybe 50-year-old COBOL programs are the original neural networks.

Really good money in it for people who want to learn COBOL though.

Good money elsewhere for people capable of (a) learning COBOL (b) being effective in a legacy codebase and (c) operating in a large organization in a political savvy way.

I’d also note that COBOL is only one layer of the stack.

The real complexity lies in also understanding z/OS (mainframe operating systems), CICS, JCL, and the rest of the mainframe runtime, it’s an entirely parallel computing universe compared to the x86 space.

> Really good money in it for people who want to learn COBOL though.

False, all those jobs were outsource and offshored long ago.

A lot of them are domestic, either in the public sector directly (so probably not really good money, but usually pretty decent benefits and job security) or with government contractors which require the work to be domestically (so maybe good money.)

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