Dumb. You are working in the age of Google-able documentation. That mainframe stuff is in 2 places: 1) printed docs which largely no longer exist. 2) The heads of a bunch of gray hairs.
And even with the docs its just a harder environment in which to work. There is no ActiveRecord for dbase.
Mainframes are still very much a thing. 40 TB of RAM, get rekt (ibm.com)
Where do you see them in the wild these days? Just out of curiosity.
Banks mostly.
Who cares if you can't read code understand a system and reimplement it you dont deserve to call yourself a programmer. All you conveyed is that you have an undocumented system that nobody understands that will be useless as soon as one person walks out the door unless you invest in a migration.
I look forward to your posts on your new and wildly successful COBOL programming consultancy.
We had a handful of programs developed in the 70's for doing various engineering calculations that were done in cobal. We rewrote them and now they arent cobol.
(post is archived)