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

Employers' fault...

[darken9999]

Maybe if employers wouldn't require every employee to have such mass amounts of experience, there would be a few younger admins around. You know, almost like a junior admin... "Well, he knows how to admin a system, so we can teach him the specifics."

I think being a mainframe admin would be a blast (maybe I just don't know better), but in my eight years of sysadmin work, I've never touched a mainframe. Every job posting I recall coming across required previous experience.

Re:Employers' fault...

[Xzzy]

> Every job posting I recall coming across required
> previous experience.

Takes a long time, but it will become a self-resolving problem. The existing "old guard" will eventually die out (either literally or via retirement) and create a demand in the market.

This will either cause companies to lower their standards or discard the old mainframes.

It would make good business sense to address the problem before it reaches critical mass (ie, so much of the old guard is gone that there's no way to train newbies), but if the Y2K problem was any indication, foresight isn't a prerequisite for running a business.

Re:Employers' fault...

[Eskarel]

Well I would agree with the fact that it's the employers fault, but disagree on what it is thay are doing which causes it.

I would of course agree with the frustration tech workers seeking employment right out of college, and workers in general for that matter. It's hard to get experience when everyone wants it to give you a job, but that's not really the problem when it comes to network and sysadmin positions.

It's perfectly sensible to require people who run something as complicated as a mainframe, or even network administration, or a half a dozen other things require strong experience. However if these companies want to have people available to work on these systems in the future they also have to provide opportunities for people to gain this experience without having to rely on them for full administration. That is to say companies should be hiring more PFY's so that they can train the next generation of administrators through real life experience.

Employers don't want to do this of course because it involves having an extra employee, but they would be much better off in the long term if they had people who had real experience.

Of course an additional problem with this sort of thing is unrealistic pay expectations among tech workers in general. No one is going to hire a PFY for 60,000 a year, but there are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job. So while a lot of it is employers being cheap, it's also somewhat us being unrealistic.

Re:Employers' fault...

[captain_craptacular]

What school did you go to? I graduated 2 years ago and it was ALL about C/C++ and there was a required class in assembler (MIPS).

I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that most CS schools were harping on C/C++ because if you knew them, you could learn almost any language quickly because >50% of them are based on C, use C syntax, use C++ object constructs, etc...

Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what?

[stratjakt]

"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."

How does linux freshen the mainframe labor pool, and not the Unix/Windows NT pool?

Linux ain't System/36 or MPE or any other mainframe OS. And show me one linux app that's written in COBOL. (The language exists, but I've never seen it put to use).

This is a self correcting problem. A good admin/coder can pick up mainframe stuff when he needs to. All the 50+ year olds are still working the jobs they got when they were 30. When they die off/retire, younger folks will pick it up.

I mean, hell, I picked up enough about MPE and FORTRAN and COBOL to do my job inside of a week. And I got competent with S/36 and RPG at my last job.

It aint rocket science. It's like a skilled machinist learning to shoe horses.

Re:Huh? Stuffing FUD in there or what?

[TopShelf]

This more a symptom of employers concentrating on specific experience more than talented personnel. A fundamental skill that the vast majority of IS professionals have is the ability to LEARN and ADAPT. Unfortunately there's no buzzword that can signify this on a resume, so it gets ignored.

So, the admins are old.

[PhxBlue]

What's the problem, here? If the 50-year-old programmer is the only one who knows jack about mainframes, hire the 50-year-old programmer. Don't whine about not having enough qualified programmers, when what you really want is just-out-of-college programmers that you can bully into working for you at half the salary of someone with real experience.

Re:So, the admins are old.

[Anonymous Codger]

50-year-old programmers aren't interested in innovation? We just want to clock time and go home? What a total load of bigotted BS. Attitudes like this are the reason older programmers have such a hard time finding work. I will look forward with pleasure to the day you celebrate your 50th birthday in your shipping crate home because the next generation of ignorant, biased young whippersnapper managers won't hire you.

main frame techies

[pigscanfly.ca]

I know a main frames adminstrator . Depending on what you mean by main frames , the newer unix based ones I wouldnt mind adminstering . The problem is that there are a whole wack of old crappy mainframes which are running legacy applications that very few people understanding sitting around . Now if there was somewhere to actually learn about how to handel those I would probably take the course ; but as it stands now most info systems degrees dont deel much with legacy applications . Maybe a college degree in legacy code / computing in addition to a BSC would be interesting (of course colleges would have to higher old qualified people) . An alternative would be "just read the manual" ; however if I "just read the manual" most places wont consider me comptenet (nor should they there are tones of undocumented "features") . What is really needed (if we are going to keep on using this legacy systems without relapcing them) is for a tech publisher to gather up a bunch of mainframe adminstrators and document all the undocument features in the older generation (and newer ones as well) of mainframes .

We are not dead, we just

[Archfeld]

moved into more lucrative positions. Match my current salary and I'll go back to hexdump processing, IMS MTO, CICS batch, MVS/TSO, JES3/2, VM, REXX, DOS/VSE you name it. I've been a mainframe/mid-range support in nearly every environment around, I can even roll a VTAM sub-area :)
But M$ exchange cluster design and management pays MUCH better.

"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no!

[fmaxwell]

Cobol programers, still needed for legacy applications, are mostly in their 40s.

Oh no! People in their 40s will only want to remain in the work force for another 20 years or so. What will the companies do then? Train people? Not in the U.S.! All employees must be hired with all needed skills. We wouldn't want to spend money training them because that investment would be wasted when we laid them off and shipped their job over to India.

Nobody gets upset that most CEOs are in their 50s. No one is concerned that corporate attorneys are usually over 40. You don't see a panic because the average charter boat captain is in his 40s.

Working in the computer field is like living the movie Logan's Run. Once you are out of your twenties, everyone from management to your fellow tech workers thinks your time is over.

Or is it simpler than that? Maybe companies realize that they can underpay and overwork young, naive, single people but that people in their 40's with experience, families, and responsibilities will expect fair pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no!

[fmaxwell]

But who's waiting to take over for the COBOL programmers? No one now, no one coming soon, and no one in the forseeable future. That's the problem.

If COBOL programmers were paid as handsomely as executives and corporate attorneys, you would find plenty of people eager to learn COBOL.

This is not some big mystery. Why would someone in the IT field go that direction when COBOL programmers are paid more poorly, have less opportunity for advancement, and generally do less rewarding work? It's like paying teachers $20K per year and wondering why more people aren't getting teaching degrees.

The pay is the problem.

Re:"mostly in their 40s" -- oh no!

[Moose4]

Mod this guy up.

Where I work, their idea of "retraining" us COBOL jockeys was to send us to MCSD 5-day cram refresher classes--never mind that none of us had coded VB6 before in our lives--and then expect us to get an MCSD certification, without EVER using the stuff in the wild. Once they realized that we couldn't do that, all training was withdrawn. Anything we want we have to get on our own, which is OK, that's the way things go--but we won't be given any opportunity to actually use the stuff unless we take a 50% pay cut to go to work as a "junior" programmer somewhere else.

Meanwhile, we see MCSDs, .NET and VB6/COM+ specialists, brought in off the street at higher pay grades and more money than 20-year veteran employee COBOL programmers. Unless they're on H-1Bs, in which case they get brought in at $20k under what even we're making.

If somebody is smart enough to be a good COBOL programmer for 15 years, they can learn new tools, even ones radically different. But instead companies will throw their older workers away--even though they're the ones that know the business processes--and bring in younger ones that they can work 90 hours a week and/or underpay.

A Non Issue

[tealover]

There are always a level of IT employees who didn't go to school and get a CS degree. It may be a clerical worker trying to move up. A painter trying to hop on the bandwagon. For many of them, they don't really know the technology out there.

Employers target these people and train them. I know. I was one of them.

I went to a school called Chubb in New Jersey, which is run by the Chubb Insurance company. It was originally an inhouse training development center for Chubb so they could train new employees on their mainframe systems. It got very popular and they opened it up to outside companies to make a few bucks. It has gotten very popular and is located in several states now.

The companies who need mainframe workers know about schools like Chubb. The only thing that has changed at Chubb over the years as it became less of a Chubb training center is that they have to cater to the people who do know about current technology, so they also offer non-mainframe curriculum. But as far as I know (haven't been there in 10 years), mainframe is still their bread and butter.

India to the rescue?

[Tablizer]

I espect India to set up mainframe training centers and train hundreds of thousands in COBOL, JCL, etc.

They have a habit of showing up at our doors for that kind of thing, whether we need them or not.

Re:Legacy

[override11]

while legacy has something to do with it, the 100% uptime (with voluntary IPL's) of our iSeries mainframe is very compelling.

Here's the scenario: A hdd fails, the system automatically calls IBM and a tech is dispatched the same day. I get paged, and meet a tech at the front door.

IBM Tech
I heard you have a drive failure here

Me
I do??

IBM Tech
No problem, I have a drive right here, it will only take a second to swap it out

He swaps out said drive, zero down time, and nary a performance hit because a hot spare came online. You have got to love that kind of service and uptime, and just plain reliability.

Re:Legacy

[BitwizeGHC]

Bjarne Stroustrup has been known to observe that the primary difference between "legacy" systems and the systems replacing them is that the legacy system works and scales.

A case can be built for the verity of that assertion as applied to the mainframe situation.

This Article Sets Up Future H1B visa increase

[Cryofan]

This article is likely a setup article for other articles which will eventually oh-so-delicately suggest that more H1B programmers are needed from India because they supposedly still have the "old" technology, and we desperately need those old Indian skills, so therefore best that we increase the h1b programmer quota.

Some things never change......

Locomotives are still around

[Ra5pu7in]

Locomotives / freight trains are still used regularly. They serve a need that cannot be met with automobiles or even 18-wheelers. For Joe Sixpack and his family, an automobile is definitely a more efficient way to cross the country. For ABC Florist who relies on fresh cuttings, locomotives take too long - trucks are better. But for XYZ Furniture ordering fifty sofas, twenty-five coffee tables, one thousand various lamps, etc., it would take a large number of trucks (each having a driver to pay) vs. twelve cars in a freight train (one driver to pay).

There is a use for mainframes in particular industries - personal computers and servers aren't the be-all end-all answer to every computing need.

From the Devil's IT Dictionary

[Frankus]

mainframe n. An obsolete device still used by thousands of obsolete companies serving billions of obsolete customers and making huge obsolete profits for their obsolete shareholders. And this year's run twice as fast as last year's.