My experience is probably not typical, but I had an EE degree and more of a self taught programming background. When I graduated in 2009 the job market was pret

My experience is probably not typical, but I had an EE degree and more of a self taught programming background. When I graduated in 2009 the job market was pretty bad but took a job doing support for a telecom company. Within a few months I found a lot of what they were doing could be automated so I started writing scripts. Very quickly this became my full time job. I later leveraged that to get a more "normal" software dev position at another company, although sometimes I miss that job because I don't think I have ever written software since then that felt as directly impactful (saving many hours and $) lol. Also, COBOL is a very unusual language to be perusing in this day in age, but you might find something in sustaining type roles at big corps and government. I would think they would actually be quite eager to find new hires that were actually interested in maintaining old COBOL but I don't know.