CObol is the epitome of a walled garden. Everything from accessing data to ui is done the cobol way. Simple things like arbitrary length string and dynamic memory allocation aren't in standard cobol.
Many companies used to run cobol bootcamps to hire developers. As recently as 2004, one local company was still doing them here. Very few of their developers studied cs in school. The boot campers studied who knows, and those who studied computers often majored in cis or mis.
So you can see how those people are really starting off at zero when it comes to switching to more modern dev stacks. I've personally seen very few make the transition.
My first paid dev job was at such a place, doing mainframe cobol, but I'd been doing hobby programming since I was 12, and writing games in c++, so I wasn't typical. I completed a bs in cs at night and moved on.
Many companies used to run cobol bootcamps to hire developers. As recently as 2004, one local company was still doing them here. Very few of their developers studied cs in school. The boot campers studied who knows, and those who studied computers often majored in cis or mis.
So you can see how those people are really starting off at zero when it comes to switching to more modern dev stacks. I've personally seen very few make the transition.
My first paid dev job was at such a place, doing mainframe cobol, but I'd been doing hobby programming since I was 12, and writing games in c++, so I wasn't typical. I completed a bs in cs at night and moved on.