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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

They said that for the mainframe and mini people at the end of the 90s and yet all the people who I know who worked in those areas are still employed, still making good money, and will still be doing so for the foreseeable future.

Technology lasts a surprisingly long time and not everybody needs to keep jumping on the new hotness.

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I think maybe you are experiencing survivor bias? Because I know tons of mainframe and mini guys who either a) retired b) left technology or c) retrained. The 2002-2004 years were bad for lots of people, but the mainframe guys were brutalized (at least in the industries/companies I was working in). Devs who a few years earlier were commanding 400-600 an hour with all the work they wanted, could not find operator jobs.

Now I assume the folks that made it through that either through persaverance, luck or skill have a pretty good niche gig. But lots and lots of people had trouble.

Yeap. The highest earning programmer I know is still writing COBOL for the same employer, as he has for the last thirty years.

Staying still can be fine, if you know what do bet on. A fast moving target like HTML is just not a good bet. Get on board of a tech entrenched in the enterprise world and you can probably make a good living for many years to come.

I visited a workshop a few weeks ago, and also attending was a COBOL programmer (in his 50s) who still was active on that platform.

I wonder whether it could be lucrative to learn COBOL (and CICS!) and work on those legacy systems that are still out there.

"While CICS has its highest profile among financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies, over 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies are reported to run CICS along with many government entities." - Wikipedia

There are COBOL devs who actually realize what they are worth and billing (banks) 200-300k accordingly.

I have a friend who's fairly young (early 30's) who heard about an opening in COBOL that a company couldn't fill, taught himself COBOL just to fill that position and ended up running his department and getting headhunted from others. Sometimes learning obsolete technologies can be a great career builder. Just make sure there's a shortage in your area.

The COBOL classes at my university were basically sponsored by a large local bank, and they would give a job offer to anyone the professor recommended.

My mother is a mainframe person. She was back in the 80's, she was in the 90's, she was in the 00's and she is in the 10's. The difference is as the supply of mainframe people goes down, her pay goes up.

It might pay the bills, but you'll work on exactly ZERO new developments.

You won't be able to work with Web/Embedded/Mobile. Your developments will probably be "new report at bank" or "fixing new bugs"

So, unless you learn other stuff, it might get you the money but it's probably something veery boring (even more boring than your corporate CRUD app)

Most jobs in Web and Mobile are fairly boring. People program Wordpress Templates for a living. Fix bugs on rails installations. Run 400 Servers that run a shop. The next app that displays data from an API. Actually, very few jobs are "exciting" as in "really new development or research that was never done before".

Boring is where the money is, because no one will do the boring work for free.

I'd pick fairly boring work with a nice team over interesting work with assholes every single time. Some people also prefer boring as in "uneventful" since they have kids, family, other obligations and value having a 9-5 job over interesting. There's a lot of reasons to pick boring. I can have exciting hobbies after work.

Agreed. I think we tend to underestimate how highly people value interesting work. If you want to do work that most people would rate as interesting, you're going to pay a very high "passion tax" for the privilege. People will put up with more competition for fewer openings, drastically lower salaries, longer hours, worse work environments, and meaner coworkers, in order to do work they feel "passionate" about.

I have interesting hobbies and am happy to do boring work in exchange for the better pay and working conditions and more free time to spend on my hobbies and family.

> If you want to do work that most people would rate as interesting, you're going to pay a very high "passion tax" for the privilege.

True. See game companies

Of course there's a whole spectrum between "boring" and "cool", and even games have some very boring parts

I will do boring if the pay is high enough. Learning a new JS framework every 6 months can get kind of tiresome as well I imagine.

What is so bad about boring? Boring means low stress, and easy work. As long as your life outside of work is fulfilling, there is nothing wrong with doing a boring job for good money.

Boredom is a major cause of stress. Maybe this discussion would go somewhere if the terms were actually defined?

I work with web/mobile. My job is still very boring at least 75% of the time. E-mails, admin, client contact, delegation of jobs to staff I'm responsible for - and that's before we get to the boring parts of the job itself. We can't all be working on brilliantly exciting stuff all the time.

This is not necessarily true. I work at a mainframe shop and we have a lot of very interesting projects to work on.

Though, my experience may be unique since we're an ISV, not a business apps shop.

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