The problem is mostly that it's boring as shit. I did a stint as a COBOL developer / systems admin for a bit out of college since I actually took COBOL classes

The problem is mostly that it's boring as shit. I did a stint as a COBOL developer / systems admin for a bit out of college since I actually took COBOL classes in college (believe it or not this is what we studied in Information Systems I/II and I'm only 32 years old... nice college education there). The language itself is actually pretty cool. I enjoyed working in it and learning legacy stuff; it made me appreciate what we do have now. The work of maintenance on old systems is just annoying and boring. That's all you generally do. Few people are rolling out new things in COBOL even on older systems. It's just maintenance, debugging, and providing support for new features when the domain you are working on requires it.