"An alarmingly large portion of the world's business and finance systems run on COBOL, and only a small community of programmers know it. Every day, 3 trillion dollars worth of transactions are handled by a 64-year-old programming language that hardly anybody knows anymore. It's called COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), and despite the fact that most schools and universities stopped teaching it decades ago, it remains one of the top mainframe programming languages used today, especially in industries like banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance. According to the International Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology (IJARSCT), 43 percent of all banking systems are still using COBOL, which handles those $3 trillion daily transactions, including 95 percent of all ATM activity in the US, and 80 percent of all in-person credit card transactions. The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days..." https://www.pcmag.com/articles/ibms-plan-to-update-cobol-with-watson
Meh, not surprised. My first programming job was with a multi-billion dollar corporation that was using 20+ year old basic code on UNIX. It's harder than people think to upgrade a large international business. If they need someone to maintain it they will likely find a candidate and train them.
to read for NASA https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17991/voyager-1-voyager-2-retiring-engineer/ some can earn a lot of money
Me too, some 40 years ago (or longer ago). Before that I learned to code in ALGOL at the uni. On those horrible punch machines and cards ....
