I can give you one good reason: Money I was a developer at a bank in my youth. I lived in a very rural area and it was one of the only nearby places willing to

I can give you one good reason: Money I was a developer at a bank in my youth. I lived in a very rural area and it was one of the only nearby places willing to hire a kid with a half complete CS degree. I dabbled in web development while there and officially made the switch four years later. I make more than five times as much now as I did back then. Before you say that it's because I was a junior developer, I knew many senior devs there were only making a little more than I was. For the record, that job was the low point of my career. The developers were terrified of technology. Everything was in COBOL (with occasional bits of assembly), and all data was stored in flat files. I remember one developer proudly proclaiming that she didn't "surf the inter-links." I blew their minds by writing a simple regex once. None of them had even heard of regexes. A fair number (not a majority, I hope) of companies using mainframes are still on COBOL. The language isn't OO (there's an OO variant, but no one uses it). It doesn't even support functions! Code re-use means copy/paste, and you can forget about metaprogramming and higher order functions. While it's true that COBOL is turing complete and anything that can be written in C can be done in COBOL, I'd point out that the same is true of Brainfuck and LOLCode. You wouldn't write a non-trivial app in either of those languages, nor would expertise in either of them alone make you a good programmer. I'm sure there are some places using mainframes who are doing cool stuff and aren't terrified of new things, but I still wouldn't want to work there. These days I'm surrounded by really smart people who love learning new things. The fact that I'm also paid an obscene amount of money to do something I love is a plus.