Good money elsewhere for people capable of (a) learning COBOL (b) being effective in a legacy codebase and (c) operating in a large organization in a political savvy way.
I’d also note that COBOL is only one layer of the stack.
The real complexity lies in also understanding z/OS (mainframe operating systems), CICS, JCL, and the rest of the mainframe runtime, it’s an entirely parallel computing universe compared to the x86 space.
A lot of them are domestic, either in the public sector directly (so probably not really good money, but usually pretty decent benefits and job security) or with government contractors which require the work to be domestically (so maybe good money.)
I wrote it in a way that's too intertwined with my other shit to be shareable with people, but honestly you can copy-paste my comment to your friendly neighborhood LLM and you'll get something decent. Indeed it uses `env`.
Basically a non-descript nylon bag with minimal accoutrements. I curse its lack of features (extra pockets, etc) on every trip, then it goes on the shelf until the next trip. It was on sale at the local sporting goods store when I was in high school. I recently bought a cheap waterproof cover for it, because I noticed that most of the advertised "waterproof" packs come with a cover.
I have a very lightweight, tiny day pack that I either roll up and stuff in the main pack, or carry on as my "personal item." That way, I can leave the big pack in my hotel room.
I developed a similar solution for Windows over a decade ago which I've been using every day. It works but it needs to be made easy for people other than me to use (Readme, requirements file, etc.) If anyone volunteers to spend a few hours polishing it, email me and I'll open-source it.
Most large organizations are hugely bureucratic regardless of whether they are successful or not :-)
In any case the prompt for the thread is somebody mentioning their (subjective) view that the deep hiearachy they were operating under, made a "wrong call".
We'll never know if this true or not, but it points to the challenges for this type of organizational structure faces. Dynamics in remote layers floating somewhere "above your level" decide the fate of things. Aspects that may have little to do with any meritocracy, reasonableness, fairness etc. become the deciding factors...
There have been countless proposals for alternative systems. Last-in, first-out from memory is holacracy [1] "Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy".
Not sure there has been an opportunity to objectively test what are the pros and cons of all the possibilities. The mix of historical happenstance, vested interests, ideology, expedience, habit etc. that determines what is actually happening does not leave much room for observing alternatives.
