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.
The secret sauce is being able to operate below your maximum effectiveness while still seeming impressive enough. That is, if you want to play the long game and get a lot done over a 5 year horizon.
Given how far back these systems go, the real challenge isn’t just the code or the lack of documentation, but the tribal knowledge baked into them. A lot of the critical logic lives in conventions, naming patterns, and unwritten rules that only long-time SMEs understand.
Using AI and a few different modalities of information that exist about these systems (existing code, docs, AI-driven interviews, and workflow capture), we can triangulate and extract that tribal knowledge out.
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