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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.)
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.
What the hell is a "mainframe"?
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You know, I personally wouldn't mind learning Cobol, but I've got no place to "use" it on and develop anything that I'd find useful and therefore no way to both really "learn" it (gotta do an actual non-trivial project to really learn a language, no?) nor any reason to learn it "for" ("to possibly get a job" is no good).
And I personally wouldn't mind learning how to use a mainframe-type thing, but where am I going to find my own mainframe to muck about with? Everybody's got (or can get access to) a linux box to "learn Unix" on. Where on earth am I going to find an S/390? Try and get ahold of an Itanium with OpenVMS (which isn't really "mainframe" mainframe, is it?)?
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.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Well, at $14/hr I can hardly blame IT guys for not bothering to learn how to SysAdmin a mainframe!
Jory
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 .
I have learnt Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby and what not... But noooooo! Today, you must know Cobol to get a job!
Darn, I was just starting to get working on my Fortran...
I code, therefore I am.
The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems. However, new applications are typically being written for scalable, multi-component architectures, not mainframes.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
Culler's paper on NoW is a classic.
maybe we can learn it on our own!
Yeah, thats it! I'll just buy myself a mainframe and...oh wait.
The problem is that the only way to get mainframe experience today is to have access to one.
Who does?
Still, I think the closest thing we can get is playing with Linux from the ground up. As a Solaris user, I can say that a lot of the internals are the same. Except, of course, that all the non-gnu versions of software suck compared to their Linux equivalents.
In fact, when I think about it, the biggest problem is employer disbelief. Can you admin Mainframes if you can admin Linux boxes? Pretty close:
-You can know NFS,AFS, and Samba
-You can know Apache
-You can know X11
-You can know sendmail/postfix
-You can know telnet/ssh/rsh
-You can know how to install security updates
I could be wrong, but I think the stuff that you don't know beyond this boils down to quirks that are dependent upon the specific mainframe.
Unless, of course, you're talking about those really old mainframes that do less than my computers do (though they're more reliable), and serve only one very, very specific purpose. For those I should think it would be obvious why there aren't more people working on it. It's way too specialized. You want somebody that knows the accounting system for one bank on a VAX that was put there in 1975 and hasn't been changed since? Talk to the guy that wrote it. How will anyone else know?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
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.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Mainframe Techies are a dime a dozen--the real challenge is finding competent PDP8/E techies these days!
Plunk your modern so-called "computer whiz" in front of one, and their first reaction is invariably one of the following:
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.
Shameless plug: Acucorp, Inc. makes COBOL development/runtime systems that run on pretty much any UNIX-like system, including Linux. We have lots of customers running on Linux from plain old PCs on up to the IBM S/390.
We had a booth at a recent LinuxWorld. Lots of people would walk by, do a double-take, and ask us, "COBOL on Linux?" Yep, believe it!
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!
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.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
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.
Table-ized A.I.
Cbttape.org is the mainframe version of open-source, but without any GPL license nonsense. We share freely or not at all!
Note that the 1978 version of IBM's MVS 3.8 operating system is public domain. This is what's included with Hercules. Source code is also freely available. The difference between MVS 3.8 and today's OS/390 is about the same as the difference between Win95 and WinXP. I.E., Win95 would give you a pretty good understanding of Windows, and WinXP just builds on that.There is a cookbook installation version with a step-by-step guide for neophytes - the MVS 3.8 Turnkey CD - follow the Voelker Bandke link.
Good luck, and when you're in Dinosaur Land - avoid the meat-eaters!You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I am constantly being ribbed by a younger guy here about being an old ex-mainframe guy. He is always going on about how there were dinosaurs crawling about when I was programming on them. Now IBM comes out with a new model called "T-Rex". I can feel a new verbal assault coming on ...
Couldn't IBM have call it something like Mainframe Extreme or something a bit more trendy?
I was sitting with an 11th grader yesterday looking through the catalogs of some nearby technical colleges. I think the kid would be a really good sys admin for some serious hardware, but the tech schools seem to be focusing on PC stuff. The only thing I could figure out was that you'd have to start with the generic training in school and then go to Sun or IBM for more specific sysadmin training (in addition to the learning on the job track).
What path would a kid take to get into real datacenter hardware?
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......
eat shiat and bark at the moon
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."
10) They view a PC/MAC as a dumb terminal "with this neat copy/paste thingie."
9) They know EBCDIC and are totally annoyed that numbers sort before letters in ASCII.
8) They are also annoyed that PC keyboards use the new-line key as ENTER.
7) "Fiber optic cable" means a 36-pair trunk. Anything less is just a device jumper.
6) They think that less than eight fiber paths to any device constitutes an I/O bottleneck.
5) They laugh at COBOL programmers. To their faces.
4) The largest program they ever wrote was 12K. The coolest was 160 bytes.
3) They know what the "National" character set is.
2) They wince at a 1.2-million line core dump, but they're glad they don't have to print it like they did in the old days.
1) They can read that core dump like it was source code.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Look how many geeks out there are *INTERESTED* in the idea, and would like to learn about it...
But as you said, we "obviously have no idea how it works" because it's hard to find out! The mainframe world is a separate place, secret, etc.
So how do we change that?
And is mainframe admin worth it financially?
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!
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.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
I find it funny that all you Java/C++ coders are upset about not being able to learn COBOL to land mainframe jobs.
I just finished taking a Java course so I could have a way out of my COBOL-dreary job.
The grass is always greener...
Now it's time to leave school and enter the real world...
.NET. So all the staff have to be retrained on .NET, at great expense and time. (But not us mainframe toads, of course, everybody KNOWS you can't teach a COBOL dog new tricks, just fire them when they've served their usefulness.)
I work for a financial institution. We run a fairly small IBM mainframe using OS/390. Our basic software for keeping up our loan accounts is 95% VS COBOL II and 5% Easytrieve Plus (a report writer language). Our files are straight VSAM--no databases to be found. Yes, it's antiquated, and yes, it works. We process information on about 150,000 loans nightly.
Several years ago, our CIO decided that mainframes are teh sux0r and that he wanted to replace it, and our COBOL loan systems, with "state-of-the-shelf" technology. He embarked on a four-year search to find a server-based system that could do what our users wanted and still process accruals, maintenance, and all the other assorted number-crunching on 150,000 loans, every night. Meanwhile, he decreed that all future development would be done using Microsoft technology--Windows NT/2000 as the platform, SQL Server as the database, Visual Basic 6.0 (!) as the language.
The first client/server development effort went twelve months over schedule and $2 million over budget. The second, in my programming group, only went in on time (but way overbudget) because we got some kick-ass VB6 programmers willing to work 75-hour weeks for 3 months. We quickly expanded to have a dizzying number of "data marts" and databases and report writers and little disconnected client/server apps...all of them fed by the mainframe. From nothing, we went to 300+ servers in 3 years at tremendous cost and tremendous headache.
Now, they are rewriting another bank system off COBOL--oh, but Microsoft no longer supports us using VB6/COM+, so now it's
Meanwhile, six of us keep those COBOL loan applications purring like an old Chrysler 225 slant six engine. It's not pretty, but by God, it works. Day after day after day, with no real drama, the numbers crunch and the money rolls in. They could be doing everything new still on the mainframe with some of the newer mainframe tools--but basically, our upper management has decided that Green Screens Are Evil. That's the only reason we're spending the money we're spending.
Oh yeah, that four-year journey for a replacement system? Ended in failure. No NT/W2000-based distributed system out there could even get close to the performance we required. Unix systems came closer, but Unix is a four-letter word around here--it's Microsoft or bust, baby, we ARE Bill Gates' bitch!
There's no substitute for a mainframe and COBOL when you've got to move huge amounts of data around on mission-critical financial systems, and do it with near-perfect reliability. Distributed systems don't have the rock-solid reliability, yet. They may someday, but not now.
So welcome to reality, Junior. COBOL isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Better pay attention in class! Either that, or learn to say, "Would you like a McTurnover with that?"
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
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.