This whole recent COBOL surge reminds me of a friend I had who was upset that he had a Bachelor's in Computer Science but still couldn't find a job while his friend with no college degree taught himself COBOL and got a job at a local bank.
That's probably because they work in isolation from newer technologies which are constantly adding business rules. Most of the mainframe work I see involves maintaining old code bases and handling batch processing.
good guess. if the rest of the organization bends over backwards to ensure that you never have to update your code to accommodate, say, more than 8 ASCII characters in a password, or hashed passwords, and the rest of the org puts their security at risk to make sure your codebase never has to change... yeah, it might be a bit laid back... :)
