alt Hacker NewsIf you are a young person, under no circumstances would I recommend that you acccept a job working with MUMPS.
You won’t be able to learn the industry best practices or the modern tools, because MUMPS predates them, and your career will suffer for it.
I will say (if you have that first 5-10 years of experience or so), there is real value in becoming an expert in some enterprise technology that was extremely popular 20+ years ago. The COBOL consultants getting $500 an hour right before Y2K might be an exaggeration, but you can build a career on getting businesses out of legacy systems messes.
My father is an expert on the IRS-specific IBM 360 Assembly code base and their tangled webs of attempts to get off of it, and it made for a very comfortable (and well compensated) role for the last 20 years of his career.
I would definitely not suggest COBOL or MUMPS to a 20 year old, but as a niche for a 30 year old for a stable gig? Some of these legacy systems are never going away.