I work for a company that uses COBOL still and have talked with many people that work in other mainframe shops. You are correct that the pay being great is gene

I work for a company that uses COBOL still and have talked with many people that work in other mainframe shops. You are correct that the pay being great is generally not true. The two exceptions are people with decades of experience that have the advantage of understanding the business logic they helped build during their time and the truly exceptional people out there that work as contractors for desperate companies unable to find people that can understand their systems. So there is money in COBOL, but I don't think it's particularly accessible to anyone new. Maybe as more veterans retire, salary rates for new devs will go up. There is an interesting trade off between paying more to attract talent and taking the risk of migrating off a mainframe. COBOL is easy to teach, the hard part is maintaining the business logic that was built up over decades. Our parent company recently shut down their mainframe, but it took them nearly 7 years to complete that process. Many other companies have failed and wasted years and millions of dollars trying to migrate. It is massive challenge.