There is still great pay if you are an AS/400 guru. About 3 years ago I interviewed for a job where I would be maintaining code which was running on an AS/400 running in System 36 emulation mode. The code had been certified by the government for a 50 year contract. The 3 previous employees had all died. Which didn't make me anxious to take the job, but the pay was $450k a year. And with job security through 2030 it had some appeal. But what do you do after?"I have experience with 50 year old software" is kind of like the resumes people send me saying they know Office XP and Word Perfect.
Sure if you can fix the things nobody else can you can charge top dollar, but eventually the last of those things come out of service.
Ecio78|11 years ago
In an ideal work I'll probably take that job, ask for 80% part-time and use the remaining 20% of the time to maintain my brain active :)
BTW in my previous companies (banks) we were using banking software running on AS/400 (and DB2) and interfacing from IIS/SQL Server via OLEDB for querying the data / executing stored procedures. Actually the service was hosted, but I'm quite sure the AS/400 developers were taking 1/10 of that amount... ;)
dodders|11 years ago
I don't believe a significant proportion will have been retired since.
Languages never die - they just keep running...
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9004821/Cobol_The_New...
drakaal|11 years ago