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Mainframe Operators Needed
blueforce writes "Computer World is reporting that there's a shortage of skilled mainframe workers on the horizon. Quote: "Getting IT professionals, especially young ones, interested in learning mainframe work isn't easy." No kidding. While I've never worked on a mainframe, I have worked on AS/400's. 3 words - Mind Numb ing. Perhaps it's time for a more long-term solution to the problem. Interesting nonetheless. Who'da thunk it - a shortage in IT. What's next, COBOL?"
The problem is lack of specialized talent. In neither undergraduate nor graduate school (graduated last year) was a single mainframe course offered. The "old timers" who work on mainframes here are their own special group-- very few people are brought in, and certainly it would be a good idea to change this, since mainframes are years ahead of PCs in terms of hardcore OS technology. If colleges didn't focus so strongly on learning VB and Office, maybe CS degrees would mean as much as they used to...
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
1) Hire vets. People getting out of the service are a good source for these skills. That was where I got my training.
2) Pay more. Companies have to adjust.
This just happens to be interesting because it is unusual in this job market. It's nice to know I have some skills that might be in demand if my current job goes away.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
We still run a couple of HP3000s...a 928 and a 918. Before that we had another model, I forget which one. In any case, there is 20+ years of custom in-house COBOL programming invested in those systems. Most of that code is still serving its purpose very well. We have started updating the apps and have done some web development with it, but if it works, why change it? The only reason we have even considered migration is because HP has finally pulled the plug on the 3000 line, not because it couldn't serve its purpose. And hey, who doesn't like a half-obscure OS (MPE/ix) running on a 48MHz machine supporting 200+ users?
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
I administer several AS/400's, and if it weren't due to the Win2K domain I also administer, I'd have nothing to do.
AS/400's just run. I take an hour or so to go through the backup logs - which are mostly automated now. I just search for "Not Saved" and check that the value is zero. Anything else, I investigate. I check the logs for break in attempts and any severe errors.
They do have some tasks that people just must do. Someone with "QSECOFR" or 'root' authority must check the message logs to make sure no processes are looped, or that pool memory isn't all used etc.
Every once in a while the lock tab on a backup tape will get flipped (anyone who uses a Magstar 3570 know what I mean - Arrrrg!), and the machine will be in a restricted state come morning. Then all hell breaks loose until you kill the backup processes and restart subsystems so people can work. There are just some things that need a human decision.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Anyone remember that Woody Allen movie, "Take the Money and Run"?
This was funny in 1967 and is senseless today, because in 1967, nobody's aunt had a computer. And today, nobody's aunt has a AS/400 sitting around. So the only way to learn is on-the-job, which means there's that chick-an-egg problem of: you can have the job if you have experience, you can get experience if you have the job.With PCs today, you just spend an affordable amount of money, and you can start learning.
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Heck, this could be a long list. I'll save some of the fun for somebody else.
When you compare MVS to UNIX to Linux, and do the math, MVS wins big. Billions of lines of mainframe investment are not going anywhere soon. Billions were spent on making legacy systems Y2k compliant, now that the investment has been made, companies are finding it difficult to call for a re-write.
IBM saw this coming a while back. The 390 mainframes were renamed Enterprise Server (and we all snickered). However, the enterprise server is now running Linux, Websphere, integration services, websites, ASPs, and the legacy systems with incredible stability.
It is difficult to find operators because in many mainframe shops the job consists of running print jobs and contacting support staff when alerts occur. It is no longer a career. It would improve if companies started treating it like a first step. Hire some college students or entry level employees and provide a career path to greater opportunity. Isn't that what we all want?
Its a lack of opportunities. I for one have some IT experience, and have been passed up over and over for entry level mainframe IT jobs because they want someone who already has experience in it.
I know plenty of out of work IT people who'd be eager to learn mainframe IT if it meant a job, they just aren't willing to teach it.
In my first job out of University, I was a programmer (not an operator) for the R&D division of a multinational that dealt with mainframes. At 22, not only was I a mainframe systems programmer, but most of the work I was doing wasn't on MVS (the IBM flagship mainfram OS), but VSE, the evil, hunchbacked midget brother of MVS.
Trust me: ugly. Nasty, nasty, nasty. As other people have pointed out, I didn't do any mainframe courses at University. What I did at this job was read a _lot_ of IBM manuals, and attend a bunch of IBM courses.
For those that know the territory, I even went on a JCL (Job Control Language) course.
Basically, for those people used to working and developing in the modern GUI and development tool environment - run in fear. The other people I worked with though pointed out that if you knew this stuff, you would always have a job. Something which this article seems to be higlighting.
I must point out that in hindsight it was very good experience. Being taught to read mainframe dumps, and having to deal with things every day on the bit and byte level was a great foundation for my continued career.
I also bailed from the company after being there for just over one year, wanting to get out of the mainfram environment. And trust me - being an operator is WAAAAAY less interesting than being a systems programmer.
I can remember when ComputerWorld was a MainFrame magazine (then again, it was a mainframe world). This is just an article from the old-timers at ComputerWorld remembering the good old days when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Training is no substitute for experience and common sense. My favorite computer operator story is as follows:
The company was having a traing class for new mainframe operators, and the class let out for break. Just a few minutes later, the phones went nuts in the data center because so many problems were happening all of a sudden. Turns out the the trainee was practicing for her operations class by killing active jobs, such as CICS, etc. on the console where no-one was paying attention to her. It took the better part of the day to get everything running correctly again.
Imagine coding all day at a screen limited to 20 lines, 80 characters wide, all capital letters, red text on a black background. This is regardless of screen resolution. You can customize colors on your Windows client, but it's pretty much the same. I've downloaded programs into text files to study them for sanity's sake before.
Imagine no debugging. Just hardcoded write statements.
Imagine jumping through 1,000 loopholes to recreate test data, only to discover too late that the production data still doesn't work - your code is wrong.
Imagine top down programming. Structured? Sorta. No object-oriented nature at all. Being punished by people thirty years older than you for trying to use a function or some reusable code. Make a change to a program? Good - now change the 10 others sorta like it.
Now imagine that suddenly your clientele (college students in my case) suddenly want all their data to be accessible via the web. Now do you chuck the old busted system? No, you instead place more systems on top of it to interface it with your web system. Synchronization? Forget about it. Transactional data over the web? Not gonna happen.
I'm 26. My colleagues are dinosaurs. I'm getting out as soon as I can. I'm not sure what's gonna happen to this situation in the long run but I don't care.
My colleague across the room from me is thirty years older than me, is nursing a bad back and refuses to learn anything new. He's the guy with a hammer who sees everything as a nail. He has a bizarre theory that the bad economy is good because it means the COBOL programmers of the world shall rise again (I'm pretty sure JFK and Roswell factor into his theory somewhere). Sad thing is he may be right - only they're rising in India.
Schnapple
Unless you're a system software programmer (device driver, BIOS, embedded, etc), in which case you get to play with much cooler hardware than the admins.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
That was exactly my experience. Starting out in OS/390 is like trying to understand a foreign culture, in a different language. All the subtle little cues that you use to help find your way around a new system are different than you expect them to be.
There are silly little things, like the fact that the "Enter" key is different from the "Return" key--to enter, you need to use the Enter on the number pad, not Return. Or how everything that, in the unix world, would be lowercase is uppercase. Or how the acronyms are constructed--a logical partition is called LPAR, for example, instead of, I dunno, LP.
Obviously, all these little things are no big deal. However, they all contribute to the feeling that you're not in Kansas anymore. And that's when you're just starting and haven't even gotten to the nitty gritty....
This is a person complaining about a mainframer refusing to learn anything new? I'm incensed. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
I'm 34, an administrator on a z900 running OS390, and it rocks. Please explain what's tough about creating test data? I think we get to the root of the problem - "your code is wrong".
EVERYTHING you complained about above pertains to your coding and the language (COBOL), NOT the platform. On my box, you can do COBOL, Assembler, Java, C, C++, Perl, you name it. All the "programmers" depend on their IDEs to develop their code - they wouldn't know what's going on in there if you gave them a dump. Ooh! Wait! The dump isn't in Java! I'm confused! It's using numbers! What kind of wacky computer is this?
I've determined that Moore's law is not driven by technical innovation, but simply by the need to keep up with shitty programming.
I apologize, but this really cheeses me off.
I would whole heartedly urge getting at least a bachelor's degree in anything technical. I finished a bachelor's in physics from a small liberal arts college and found that it was the best possible course I could have taken (I currently work as an Open Source programmer and will head into alternative energy power systems engineering next year). Though liberal arts colleges have less course offerings, they do have many great opportunities. In a small (less than 3000 students) institution, there are an incredible amount of hands-on learning opportunities in research based "pure science" departments. For instance, my senior physics thesis involved designing and building the mechanical and electrical systems, then programming the computer interface to run the He3 cryostat and associated electronics I and others used to do quantum dot research. This is the kind of learning experience (along with the rest of the social thing) that is really hard to get if you don't go to college (at least for a little while). If you are one of those people (like the Willie Norris hypersound guy from a few articles back) who is just destined for bigger things, then get to them. For the rest of us however college/university is definitely a good thing if you can swing it.
As for your questions:
1. How much will a graduate/undergraduate degree affect my eventual wages as a programmer?
I can't say from experience as I have chosen to work for peanuts doing open source development for a university, (the pay isn't great, but the quality of life is through the roof!), but it definitely will help at least a little.
2. If I got an electrical engineering degree instead of a computer science degree, would I be able to make more as an embedded technology developer? In the automotive industry?
Like someone said above, "if your in it for the money, you shouldn't be here". That said, an EE, applied physics, physics, or some other well-rounded science/technical degree that involves computer work as well as knowledge of physical systems will make you much more employable (if not better paid) than a degree in computer science.
3. Is college much better than highschool course-wise?
In my experience, incredibly so. Granted, I went to an absolutely shitty high school, but in college I was able to take courses in everything from data structures to optoelectronics to "radio, microwave and coherent transmission techniques" and add in some "Modern African History" on the side.
4. Will running various website such as this [frob.us], that [mathaddicts.org], and the other one [osnippets.org] help me with admissions? With scholarships?
Probably with admissions. It could show that you have a drive to apply yourself to something that you think is important, always a good thing with admissions people. If not, it doesn't hurt. As for scholarships, no clue.
5. Definitely would redo college. The career can wait. Actually the career is on at least semi-permenant hold until I get a bit of life under my belt.
6. Know of any good tech scholarships?
Nope, but I do have many friends that were able to attend my ridiculously-priced college for free because their families didn't make much money. Granted, the cutoff is crappily low (my parents paid more in tuition than their income the year my brother and I were both in school), but if you really are poor, there is need-based aid available.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
I know plenty of older guys (my dad included) that need jobs. My dad can do mainframe stuff, but he used to do primarily embedded work. The shortage will last only as long as companies insist on hiring young people instead of older ones. Sure, I'm young, but I've noticed that the young ones tend to be very arrogant, ignorant, and sometimes downright stupid. When you see the median age at Microsoft, you shouldn't have to wonder why they have so many problems with buffer overruns, and bounds checking.
My dad's been coding for years and years and years. He had trouble trimming his resume down to 2 pages, having been a consultant. People still won't hire him, mostly because he's pushing 60. Sure, he'll cause higher insurance premiums, he may not last 40 years with the company (as if many young ones would), but he can still contribute skills that have had 30 years of refining...
God Damn H-R departments.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.