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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.)
Agreed, another major problem is that for many mainframe sysadmin type situation, that stuff just isn't taught in school anymore.
Our program mainly focused on C, C++ and assembler, with a smattering of COBOL and RPG. I spent the first few months learning this stuff when I got hired. Where I am now, we've just spent months interviewing people for junior positions and none of them even had THOSE basics.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
Maybe you should look here.
(It's an emulator for the ESA/390, etc.)
Eli
And when they decide to pay those mainframe devs with real money, some of us kids might be a little more interested in learning. I know a few guys with a ton of mainframe experience... they keep getting shuffled between giant companies, with pay cuts every time. Screw that.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
As others have noted, the biggest hurdle is that there's no good way for an interested geek to learn firsthand about mainframe systems and OSes. While Hercules takes care of the hardware, at least enough for people to run something to learn on, the same isn't true for the operating system. Modern IBM OSes are hideously expensive, for an individual (unless you're Bill the Gates), and there's been some persistent comments that they won't license them on Hercules anyway (although I have no direct knowledge of this, either way).
I've been advocating a hobbyist license for IBM OSes for use by individuals with Hercules for some time now. There's a white paper at http://www.conmicro.cx/ibmhobbyistlic.html. Aside from a few curmudgeons, and aside from the folks at IBM who make the decisions, the reaction I've gotten to this paper has been uniformly positive. I believe that it would help slow the slide, at least.
In the meantime, the interested can get a running copy of the last public-domain version of MVS from the CBT Tape web page, which is a great resource for the mainframe community in general.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Even when they did teach such things, it wasn't called "Mainframe SysAdmin". You mainly went to school for programming. If you wanted to go the "Systems Programmer" route, you usually started out as an operator (mounting tapes for backups, printing, managing queues), then moved your way into systems programming. Every place I ever worked at never referred to any position as "Mainframe sysadmin". The typical mainframe system is just to big/complex. While mainframe ideology has filtered it's way down to smaller machines, I frankly get tired of people thinking you can be a "sysadmin" for a mainframe. Sorry if I come off as a mainframe bigot, but that's where I started. Yes, I'm in my 40s (with a good 25 years more work ahead of me).
For the most part most of the things you list are at best peripheral - they are now appearing but are not mainstream.
Learn z/OS (or os370, MVS etc) and or one of the VM family. Study Rexx, JCL and RACF/ACF2 and a few of the common utilities such as IEFBR14, IEHLIST, IEBGENR, IEBPTPCH (there are hundreds more). That lot may get you a junior post, unless a company is running a linux partition on their machine the linux skills will be next to useless. An old fashioned site (most, I suspect) will have no perl, vi, emacs or anything you'd expect on a nix box, and there is no gui, interaction is screen based, probably using ISPF under TSO. Connectivity is probably still using SNA although tcp/ip may be a possibility.
Some of the m/f software I mention may have been superceded, but the new versions build on the old. IBM are, deliberately, rarely revolutionary, evolution is their strong point. They do their best to ensure old programs run on new machines wherever possible.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Good Question. The mainframe where I work is the SMALLEST piece of equipment on the machine room floor. The most space is taken up by huge racks of NT servers. The next most by a huge RS6000 complex. The mainframe is dwarfed by comparision. The biggest difference between a mainframe and a midrange box is IO. The mainframe IO is much different from PCI or SCSI that midranges use. On current mainframes, you can move 24 gig into or out of central memory every second (this is doubling in the next generation mainframe - the Z990). Try that on a RS6000.
The mainframe I work on does not run under unix, it runs under a proprietary OS which originally predates unix by at least a decade. The only thing it has in common with unix is that it uses a command-line interface.
NFS, AFS, Apache, X11, sendmail/postfix, ssh/rsh have no counterparts on this mainframe - if we need something like that then we interface to a linux/NT machine.
Samba does have an equivalent, but it looks totally different.
The machine can act as a Telnet server, if you allow that.
The normal connection software is via software that emulates their old terminals, several companies sell different emulators.
Some of your TCP/IP knowledge could be of use, but that is all. You obviously have no idea how the thing works or what it can do (just as I have very little idea of kernel internals, for example) and an employer would see that immediately.
I worked on these beasts for almost 20 years before being confronted with linux. I can write primitive bash and perl scripts, and configure+administer a server. This makes me the only person in the group who can and makes me a 'linux expert' (!), they are that different.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
If you've got the free time, say 12-24 weeks or so...
Go buy an IBM Education card (around $3-$5k depending on which one you buy).
Head toward an IBM education center / Training center. (The one in Atlanta is very good).
And learn all you want for one low price. It's how I managed to learn AIX. Took me about 6 weeks to become very intimate with aix administration.
Steven V.
IBM CATE
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
Here you go, smart ass (you really should know better than to put an obvious challenge up like that on /.)
l
1 0,00.html (Looks to be s/390 specific articles).
Some Quick Finds from Google:
Your hello world:
http://www.roesler-ac.de/wolfram/hello.htm
And Another with MVS JCL:
http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/asm370.htm
And Some Miscellaneous Links for Main frame coding:
http://search390.techtarget.com/home/0,289692,sid
http://www.texasrock.com/ (Nice collection of links)
College is fine and dandy, but that's not the only way to learn something.
You can get a mainframe emualtor (IBM 370 series here http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/ They also have links to versions of various IBM OS's that you can download. Enjoy!
Fully aware the IBM minis are not mainframes, I'm going to back you up on this. Fresh outta college with my VAX/VMS and Sun experience, I find myself in a System/38 shop.
Oh. My. God.
Absolutely nothing is the same. There is just barely a command line on the '38. The database is practically part of the OS. There is no "shell" as we know it. The programming languages (AFAIK, just COBOL and RPGIII) were as far as you could get from C-ish stuff, lacking anything remotely like printf() or even puts() for output, handling input through a faux-VSAM file interface.
Totally, totally alien. I caught on reasonably quickly, but what a culture shock. I learned an amazing amount in the first few months.
They don't even use freaking ASCII! Barbarians!
IBM minis are a whole different world from the Unix family. I can say with some certainty that going from Unix to Microsoft OSen is much less of a jump than Unix to mainframes or proprietary minis.