Another thing is that the mainframe vendors use their locking to get a lot of money. So some companies want to leave that, except they can't because the busines

Another thing is that the mainframe vendors use their locking to get a lot of money. So some companies want to leave that, except they can't because the business logic written in COBOL works well. Therefore, the company let most of its COBOL workforce go, keep some old guys to maintain programs and divert investment to other platforms. When the old maintenance crew will be dying, businesses will have had time to move out of the mainframe. That's what I see at a few government agencies in my country : COBOL is still alive, but it's just slowly dying and nobody invest in it anymore. And the jobs associated to it are labelled as "maintenance", good luck getting a pay rise. Tips : Oracle feels the same, we're moving to Posgtresql wherever possible. So my career path is basically set : Java will stay on top because there's no language that is better in my segment (batch processing, long lived code, just a hell of a business logic, thousands of rules) and Oracle will be pushed out by in place replacement like postgres. I'm gonna die in an open source world :-)