Back in the 1990s, my youngest uncle kept telling me to learn #COBOL instead of #Java (though at the time, I was taking courses with Microsoft #BASIC ... and later took both COBOL and Java, along with #Pascal, #Visual_Basic, #JavaScript, #Perl, #PHP, and more).

At the time, he was making $100,000+ and taking time off whenever he wanted. I think he made a lot more during the fixes that prevented #Y2K from becoming the expected meltdown, but he then ran into headwinds because foreign programmers were being imported to do the work for a lot less than what he was accustomed to earning, so he retired.

I thought about this back when the lockdowns geared up and state governors were crying about lacking the COBOL programmers to fix their unemployment insurance systems.