I touched some cobol on the side. My experience is these people are business knowledge keepers first and developers second. The language capability and their

I touched some cobol on the side. My experience is these people are business knowledge keepers first and developers second. The language capability and their tech level was extremely low. I got superpowers like grepping the full code base for a thing to refactor, or writing an sql select statement that could query a whole table at once, instead of just 1 record. Otoh, I ran into trouble when trying to integrate an url longer than 1 line of 80 chars. Non ISO8859-characters are still impossible over there. Their superpower was explaining what the business actually did, what edge cases were forgotten,... The unfortunate truth was I was easily replacable with any dev from the last 20 years, if only someone wanted to actually talk to them instead of stonewalling them for their incomprehensible elder rituals. And I got paid a lot better, too.