These systems in my country are still used a lot. Go to a store, look behind the counter and you will see Windows 10 with opened only a maximized window of a green/black terminal connected to an AS/400. I've seen it even on store opened this year! And as they tell me programmers are even well paid since more and more retire every year and the young one doesn't know these systems.

The funny thing is that I'm not even that old, reading my initial comment you would think I'm talking about the 80s or 90s, but I got my experience with COBOL in 2009-2013 (not 4 years straight, I did other stuff too) when working at an insurance company. At the time almost the entire company was run from a few AS400 (and A LOT of office-people doing insurance stuff, of course).

You are probably not getting paid your worth then, experience with these is gold and all the new upstart programmers can't even compete with you on the high-paying jobs that rely on this knowledge.

Im not sure thats true. Last year when the unemployment systems got overwhelmed, I read a state was desperate for cobol developers and was offering some laughable salary. Searching for 'cobol developer average salary' seems to confirm it's not worth much.

These systems are now so old that the only people running them are those that have consistently under-allocated resources to IT. Penny pinchers arent known for paying out huge salaries to people.

Much more likely they'll continue paying as little as possible, and then award a huge contract to Oracle et al to rewrite it when they cant find anyone.

The state might be, however they’ll likely contract the work out and the company who’ll pick it up will pay a lot especially if they taking on that specific contract to get their foot in the door.

You also have a lot of financial institutions, insurance companies, health providers and big retail/manufacturing companies that have a lot of legacy systems and they pay quite well.

I don’t know about that specific case but quite often government institutions are locked into salary tiers they can’t offer more nor do they actually expect to find anyone for that position it’s just often a requirement proper to issuing a tender.

Basically it goes like this “we tried and we can’t find anyone for $56,000 per year to fix our system, we issued a tender and got proposals for $350-400K so that’s the budget we need”.

That's fine, I'm not optimizing my life for money. I'm glad I don't have to deal with IBM mainframes anymore.

I suppose that is fair, though I still think the skillset is a valuable and marketable skill worth noting you have. I work in an environment that has both IBM mainframe and modern technologies, and familiarity with both would presumably count as an asset.