is it that bad?
maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)
Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get degrees" crowd who just want to clock in, clock out, keep their head down, and retire with a nice pension.
I wanted to work on sexy technology, wrangle clouds, contribute to open source, and hack in modern languages.
I have many friends who are still at that bank 20 yrs later. They're all directors of this that or the other thing, still just grinding out some midlevel whatever career and cruising comfortably. If that ticks all your boxes then by all means go hit up a bank job.
By the time I left I couldn't drink enough liquor in a day to rinse the stench of that job off me. If I hadn't managed to slip that place I'd be dead of liver failure by now.
It's the secret for a long life for some folks, but it ain't for everybody.
Although I probably don't make nearly as much as that COBOL developer over 20 years later, I would be willing to bet that I am happier and haven't locked myself into a specific technology the way that developer probably has. Money is great, but if you actually care about what you do, I expect that being stuck on the same codebase for years isn't too satisfying (at least on code you didn't have a hand in creating from the very start). Too many people translate money into happiness, and I guess there is a balance there, but usually it's not possible to maintain happiness based off money when you do the same thing day in and day out.