My experience as a young person who has worked on COBOL and has worked for a very large "soul-sucking" bank is that they fired or forced out all of the older de

My experience as a young person who has worked on COBOL and has worked for a very large "soul-sucking" bank is that they fired or forced out all of the older developers who knew how the system worked years ago. No one who's left really understands anything, and most code has been running un-maintained (luckily the older developers were pretty great) for YEARS. Because of that, there's no one capable of mentoring anyone else. My experience as a web developer, though, has led me to believe that while mainframes do some really neat things, they just aren't necessary anymore. I'm certainly more than a little biased, but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't just transition to cloud or virtual web servers.