I know people that make a very good living at it. But, like anything, you have to find the 'nice' positions, and that comes from knowing something critical to a

I know people that make a very good living at it. But, like anything, you have to find the 'nice' positions, and that comes from knowing something critical to a business that almost no one else knows. You can name your price then. But that usually means you spend 20 years grinding, industry and everyone moved along, and you stuck it out. I don't think there is an advantage in general - the mean salary is probably going to be lower compared to enterprise Java, just the tails on the COBOL jobs can be lucrative. I don't think it is particularly satisfying intellectually, but that might be my bias (I don't enjoy digging through reams of code to try to figure out how to glue things together - it is a challenge). I did my time on big iron and JCL - Do. Not. Want. Of course, these days a human is probably not walking your stack of tapes to the tape readers so you can find out you have something misconfigured .... Sometimes I'd get 2, maybe three runs a a day if the operator was really spritely!