Your COBOL remark.
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Same here, but AS400/RPG. School was 9 months long, couple thousand. Got a job before I graduated. We learned Fortran, Cobol (3 month class), RPG (two week class), DOS, etc...
The owner of the first company I worked for told us all in a meeting that if you stick with this, you will all be retiring coding RPG. He said there is soo many lines of code out in the world today (1989) someone will need to be around to maintain it.
I now work from home, in FL(tax free state), 7 figures (MD salary), still coding and maintaining RPGLE. Yesterday the company was closed because of snow. I’m in FL so I had a snow day. Life is good.
Hilarious!
I had to get out of COBOL because I was in the Seattle area and eventually it was over-run with companies going to servers and $17 an hour Indians.
I became a BA. The 21 years as a COBOL programmer has served me well in this role, however.