Eh. To some extend yes but largely, no. If you loved COBOL all your life you can still find COBOL work. It's harder now but its out there. You're just not going to be working at a cool start up doing it.
So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.
The beauty of your argument is that it's unprovable. No matter what language someone might suggest they enjoy that they can't find a job writing any more, you'll always be able to counter saying "Ah, but you've not looked hard enough! They're out there!" It'll always be the candidates fault for not scouring the world searching for that AP/L role or Shockwave Flash advert.
The assertion that no matter what tech you want to work with there'll certainly be a job writing it somewhere doesn't seem right to me. Not because there won't be some uniquely rare role out there, but because very few people want literally any job, anywhere, on any salary, under any conditions just because they get to a specific language. Unless there's good jobs writing it that you would actually accept then the language might as well be dead.
Sure... I guess nothing is provable. I know COBOL devs. They say its harder and harder to find gigs but they just tend to stay in their jobs longer now. I have a relative that will probably retire in his current COBOL gig.
Not a bad thing. One becomes an expert in one niche domain (I wouldn't say COBOL is niche but you know) and comfortable sit on top of it. One can just work maybe 15, 20 years and retire early.
You also need to be aware that there will be massive pressure on businesses to remove your job though. Every single app written in a lanuage that has a diminishing number of people able to work on is a huge risk. The only reason COBOL devs are still able to fine work is because businesses like banks didn't have the foresight to remove that dependency early enough - they've been running their legacy code for far too long and now it's hard to replace. Its unlikely that they'll be keen make the same mistake again.
Yes I understand. But consider two points: 1) People who are familiar with mainframes and COBOL are probably well into their career maturity (at least 40+) and because of the luxury salary they probably do not mind an early retirement, and 2) Even when bank moves it moves slowly.
But I do think that the whole COBOL thing is coming to an end...maybe we need to find something still hot but hated by everyone, for example...Java?
> Its unlikely that they'll be keen make the same mistake again.
Companies learning from their mistakes? Large companies learning from their mistakes? Companies learning from the mistakes made 10-20 years ago by a different CEO/CTO/Leadership team? You believe it companies ability to change more than I do.
So if part of what you love is working at cool cutting edge companies then yeah you have to keep learning new cutting edge things. But if you just want to bang out code in your preferred language there will almost always be a company somewhere hiring for that.