The Enterprises Project writes about how the demand for several very specific, established skills, including COBOL, is increasing as boomers retire, taking their knowledge with them. Part of the skill gap between the old and the new is familiarity with the work flow and business processes.
Baby Boomers are retiring and taking with them the skills to run legacy technologies upon which organizations still (amazingly) rely – from AS/400 wrangling to COBOL development. That leaves many CIOs in a tight spot, trying to fill roles that not only require specialized knowledge no longer being taught but that most IT professionals agree also have limited long-term prospects. "Specific skill sets associated with mainframes, DB2 and Oracle, for example, are complex and require years of training, and can be challenging to find in young talent," says Graig Paglieri, president of Randstad Technologies.
Apparently, COBOL is still in use in 9 percent of businesses, mainly in finance and government. And so the demand for COBOL is gradually growing. If one has interest to pick up that plus one or more of the other legacy technologies, on top of something newer and trendier, there should be a possibility to clean up before the last of these jobs moves to India.
Earlier on SN:
Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 (2017)
Banks Should Let Ancient Programming Language COBOL Die (2017)
Honesty in Employment Ads (2016)
3 Open Source Projects for Modern COBOL Development
(2015)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 04 2018, @06:40PM
This is likely to be orders of magnitude more expensive than maintaining existing systems which already work for their purposes. There was certainly a huge NRE cost developing the initial systems, possibly spread over decades, and rewriting basically means throwing all that investment away. At some point the cost of maintenence may be too high (especially if requirements change, or if a marked lack of foresight has left your business stuck with zero institutional knowledge about your own systems) at which point a replacement system may be justified from a cost perspective.
There's also risk management involved, since there's a non-zero chance that a replacement system won't actually work. For example the Canadian federal government recently decided to replace their payroll system with a new one (presumably with the goal being cost savings): to say the result was an utter disaster is putting it mildly.