With a 9.5 percent unemployment rate, it shouldn’t be too hard to find people willing to work cheap and be retrained in Mainframe systems.
Yep. I got out of Boeing’s Cobol/IMS computer school in 1982 and started at Boeing at just under $7 an hour. At the time, UPS was hiring drivers at $10 an hour. I thought computers had more future. I became a contractor in the mid-1990’s and my pay peaked at $125 an hour until early 2002. I’ve been a business analyst ever since but the hits I get from Monster for cobol jobs have always intrigued me.
But you are right. I was a damned good programmer/analyst and school was only ten months long. The market could be flooded with cheap foreigners at the drop of a hat. And the ONE thing that is causing me to change careers is that I am getting sick and tired of working with people that cannot speak clear English. If I’m not careful, my complaints could get me fired.