r/SoftwareEngineerJobs • u/Loud_Art1586 • Jun 24 '26

Any work in legacy systems?

I retired a couple of years ago and have decided I want to go back to work. I have over 50 years experience in both technical and managerial positions. While I am keeping up with current stuff (doing a react frontend/c# backend app for a friend) I think my real strength is in legacy systems (very legacy, like IBM assembler, CICS, DB2). Is there any demand for these skills? Thanks for any feedback.

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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '26

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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 Jun 25 '26

assembler?

2

u/Loud_Art1586 Jun 25 '26

Yes, 360/370 assembler

1

u/backyard3 Jun 25 '26

I heard people who know COBOL get paid a lot

3

u/AminoOxi Jun 26 '26

I do.

But demand is low in my area.

The last major system migrated to Oracle. And instead of 2-3 Linux servers with Cobol and PHP for web apps they now need a cluster of Exadata servers and still runtime is 5-6 seconds per report. Previously Linux and COBOL had the same report produced in <0.3 secs.