Does anyone ever fear falling behind the technology 8-ball.

I made a career move from web dev to mainframe in COBOL. I've been here two weeks and feel like learning COBOL is wasting my time and making me fall behind.

Thoughts?

Woot... How old are you do you have any background in Cobol? I think you just will be working with legacy projects.
Maybe you will be making much money if you're going to be a real expert, but nothing with a with a interesting future. :/

I'm young in my early 20's. Just started learning COBOL 2 weeks ago when I got hired. Prior to that I had no experience. All prior experience was c#, .net etc

but... why?

@TECKSPEED are you working as a developer in a bank?

Please don't go down that road. Stick to .net and master many parts of the .net technolgy stack. You'll have a bright future ahead of you.

@CodeMasterAlex why do you say don't go down that road? Is it a dark alley?

I'm in manufacturing so all of their stuff runs COBOL

i understand that cobol is still being used in certain industries. but developers with enough proficiency is getting scarce. hell, even if they plan to migrating their long live system to another "modern" language still needs someone who understand cobol and the cost will be sky rocketing.

so, knowledge wise, i wouldn't say it's a waste of time.

you can always learn other language in parallel anyway.

But does scarce = money?

depends on the project and demands...
if you got what they need and they need it desperately, then there's your bargain point

@TECKSPEED Well, I am an independent contractor and don't see many cobol job openings. Of course sometimes there are but if I see them a couple of times in a year it's a lot. Besides that, you should do what makes you happy and if I understand your post correctly cobol does not seem to make you happy. Yes, you can earn much more money because there are almost no cobol devs but I don't believe that is the right motivation for the long term. You can also do so by specializing in some technology built on .net.

When doing .net however, you have many different technologies to work with, e.g. asp.net mvc, web api, wcf and many more, so you won't easily get bored. In addition it is very easy to switch to other languages like c, c++ and java if you know c#. You'll just lack some framework knowledge. So, in my opinion, you have a much broader and less boring way of doing this now and in the future.