I'm not talking about a first gig, I'm talking about skills and skillsets where you aren't competing with new devs and the .js flavour of the month. Sorry to hear about your friend, but my friends in the mainframe priesthood tell me - "it's not about knowing COBOL so much as it is the CICS/JCL and other legacy stuff that keeps that COBOL alive they are really paying for". The kind of things that unless you lived it you can't possibly know because it never made it into google.