Re: "guaranteed a job."
We have plenty of COBOL customers who are not using CICS or IMS or z batch-mode environments.
It does seem to be common to tie COBOL jobs to particular environments: "we want someone who can write COBOL for Siemens BS2000", as if people capable of working on that machine are born that way and couldn't possibly have learned it.
That said, the COBOL standards leave ample room for major differences among implementations, and pretty much all of them have extensions. So you can't just move COBOL expertise from one implementation to another. And it's also true that real-world COBOL applications will have to deal extensively with their environments. But these are things which can be learned.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
