Mainframe Techies Are A Dying Breed

dipfan writes "Great piece in today's Financial Times on the surprising survival of mainframes - but the problem in the US is finding experienced techies to run them: "55 per cent were over 50, compared with fewer than 10 per cent of those with Unix or Windows NT server skills." Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s. Help is on the way, though, thanks to IBM's use of Linux, which "freshens the labor pool" according to the article." (See also this earlier post on the mainframe-operator labor pool.)

Comments

Not too surprising really

[Jack Wagner]

I've done a smattering amoung of work on mainframes and I always find it quite refreshing for myriad reasons. First and foremost I can charge premium bucks since it's all about supply and demand. Secondly, it's always a pleasure to get to work on a real computer since most of my work these days is spent on that heinous X86 scrap that society seems to think passes for computers these days.

Lets face it, working on a FreeBSD box after working on an old mainframe is like driving a VW bug with flowers all over it after driving a boss 69 camereo.

And finally since the skillset to work on these is above and beyond that which your average windows admin/coder has, I am fairly secure in my knowledge that I have job security.

It's like Rick Brooks said in the Mythical Man Month, if you are in the upper 5% of computer scientists you will always be employed making in the upper 1% wage group.

Warmest regards,
--Jack

Bullshit.

[Bowie J. Poag]

Got 7 flavors of Unix under my belt, mainfraime experience both from the administration end as well as the programmer end, plenty of certs.

I'm right here. You can hire me today instead of paying for Long Duck Dong to hop on a boat.

Re:So, the admins are old.

[Schnapple]

Problems

1. The 50-year-old programmer will want more money. Not so much a problem for us as it is for the company in question.
2. The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon (as has been mentioned), meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.
3. It's entirely possible that your 50-year-old programmer is working on being a 60-year-old programmer or even a 70-year-old programmer - i.e., badly in debt and no hope of retiring and increasingly feeble. Sure, we all know of people on the top of their game well into their 80's but these are the exceptions. Plus, odds are one of these days the programmer may die on you. I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.
4. The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.

Again, the answer to the problem today is "hire the 50-year-old programmer" but ten years from now it may be "where are all the programmers?" or "do we dare hire this 60-year-old programmer?". Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike - sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?

Re:Legacy

[jedidiah]

Smaller distributed systems are perfectlly capable of being recoverable in 18 MINUTES. If you're bragging about mainframes being recoverable in 18 hours, you simply need to get over yourself.

System recovery time is simply a function of the commitment level of management.