That's my experience. I've actually been around systems that use Cobol amongst other things for 20 years (only did tiniest bit myself) but the developers tend to be experts in business as well - like, this set of Cobol programs are for payroll, and the developers understand payroll processing. They can discuss legislative nuances and taxation and benefits and deductions with functional analysts.

Basically, all Cobol I've ever seen is firmly performing a business / functional task. I guess it's in the name :-)

The problem is that the "cobol language job" is really a mainframe job which means an operating system that is from a completely alien parallell reality that diverged from the rest of the timeline 60 years ago. So it's not a cobol job, it's a relearn computing from the ground up again job. I'm exaggerating but it's a complete nervous system shock until one acclimates to the zOS paradigm.

Do you speak from experience?

Honestly, I find the whole mainframe world fascinating. Would love to learn more.

Yes I maintain two systems on the mainframe been doing it for 8 months

Apparently, an "x language job" was a well-known concept from the "before times." ;-)

I'll always vividly remember this article from the days when I began to become entranced with IT Tech stuff... http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9712.htm

I was getting into Linux around then too so I devoured Litt's site. Shortly after I read this my cobol-programming neighbor (worked for CapOne) was laid off. As far as I know he never returned to Cobol programming (unless he managed to snag something during covid).

I’d like to know these places you speak of because every single time I’ve applied for a job in the past ~15 years where I didn’t have explicit experience in the specific programming language that was specified, I failed to get the job. A lot of those that I applied for I had significant domain knowledge as well. In fact I can’t even think of a time I got further than an introductory phone call.

But that is because HR people and recruiters generally don’t know anything about anything tech. They cannot filter resumes on anything vague, so programming language is an easy one. But gp is right; once you are in, the language is mostly irrelevant, unless the company is small and/or their business is selling or maintaining actual tech products.