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No, they don't, because it's a buyer's market.

(My dad is an AS/400 programmer. There's a lot of competition and not much work.)



It depends. If you have only traditional RPG/400 etc experience there are 10 programmers for each job, yes. But, in this marketplace, if you have experience with (traditional) RPG but also modern techniques like OO, Java, etc, you have lots of work for the coming decennia i assure you. These systems don't disappear, but they do have to be "modernized" and refitted to accommodate the changing environment. There is demand for it, but business do not know it's a modern system for which you can build modern software. The traditional RPG programmer will say something like "well XML and web services etc is too difficult, let's just use CSV and FTP like always". These days it's called "IBM i" and you can do about anything with it, there's even a port of node.js for example. It also has a binary compatible AIX subsystem which integrates with the rest. You can even call it (from a programmer's standpoint) - and it officially is - a UNIX system (POSIX compliant that is). Etc. When you see a green screen you see old software, not an old system that only supports green screens. And there are still more than 100.000 individual customers/companies using this system. And lots and lots of old RPG code, which only grows.




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