COBOL is not hard. It’s a very straightforward language, but it’s not what you’d be doing if you picked up Cobol today. Coding in any large software system that has forty or more years of patches, workarounds, acquisitions and reorganizations baked into it and doing it in COBOL which was never designed to handle all of the data, object, policy and security realities of today — without breaking a system that is so critical to the business that it hasn’t replatformed once in all this time — is what you’ll be paid to do. It’s good money, but it’s far from easy money for someone to break in to.
True. I used to special in foxpro...it was the exact same situation. In this one place I was probably the 4th or 5th person that worked on a database. Lot's of spaghetti!