> I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them They don't have enough work to train them on and whatever they have is actually critic

> I wonder why those big companies don't hire someone new and train them They don't have enough work to train them on and whatever they have is actually critical enough to need someone experienced. My partner was hired to be a COBOL programmer right out of college in 2004 & trained to work on AS/400s. The problem was that everything was a small part of a big project, but you got no experience building a big project over its lifetime to see how it should be done. And on top of it, a lot of things which were "the right way" in 1991 wasn't so great in 2005. So a lot of work was actually bringing the existing work to code before you could do the tiny bit of work which is actually needed.