The Canadian federal government uses a lot of COBOL. My first job out of university in 1996 was maintaining COBOL programs that fed data from Revenue Canada to

The Canadian federal government uses a lot of COBOL. My first job out of university in 1996 was maintaining COBOL programs that fed data from Revenue Canada to the CPP. My first task was to rewrite a COBOL program originally written in 1972 into "modern" COBOL-85! Which is to say that COBOL shops are not exactly on the cutting edge of technology. So I quit doing COBOL programming in 1998 after I'd paid off my student debt and taught myself C++ (although nowadays I use Python and Go). Having said that, mainframes are still competitive in their niche (high performance batch processing) which is why they're still around. But as a career option you have to keep in mind that it won't be technically stimulating and you're probably vulnerable to the work being outsourced overseas to cheap body shops.