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The Greying of the Mainframe Elite
bobcote writes "The Boston Globe is running a story about the maintainers of the mainframes getting older and facing retirement. One of the problems is that many computer science programs don't include mainframes in their curricula anymore. From the article: "Amid concerns that America doesn't produce enough technically trained young people, mainframe computer users and developers are especially concerned. Most computer science students concentrate on small-computer technology, such as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating systems, or the popular alternatives Unix and Linux. Few have been trained on zOS, the operating system that runs IBM Corp.'s massive mainframes."
Here's a link for those of you who would rather not register just to read the second half of the article...
Who'll mind the mainframes?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
As the older people start to retire I am sure younger people in the company will see where the promotion opportunities are and will learn on the job as needed.
You know you are only in school for a few years, but on the job training goes on your whole career, like 40 years or more.
Very little of what I learned in school is applicable to what I am doing now.
Personally I don't think schools should even try to teach such technical skills, leave that for on the job learning or for post college certification training. What colleges need to do is teach people the ability to learn on their own, to have the confidence and the habits needed to go after new fields of knowledge.
That's why I can't stand it when I see universities teaching Java and C#. By the time those kids get out of school that train will have left the station. Maybe teach that to final year students so that when they do their internships they have the basic skills. Otherwise I would expect someone who is really interested in computers to be playing with all that stuff from when they are much younger.
Peace, or Not?
Well, sort of. Here's the group: Share.
IBM'ers show up at every conference and present. They are easily accesible. I went for the UserBlue AIX specific portions (and got access to network device driver engineers!), but if you go to the non-AIX,non-eServer HACMP stuff its a whole world of applied mainframes.
There is a community out there and IBMers are looking after it.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
You mean something like this?
IBM Learning Services have a large selection of courses available for z/OS.
I do think that making these courses better available and better publicized to college students would be a great idea though...
[disclaimer: I work for IBM tough not in the z/OS area. Above is purely my personal opinion]
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
I had a job at a bank several years ago that stored everything on an IBM ES/9000. This was purported to be one of the largest machines of this type shipped from IBM to a customer. The thing was water cooled, had a staff of 10 people to maintain it, and required a hand scan just to get in the room. It ran everything you'd think and scoff at...mostly cobol jobs and a lot of JCL. I was a newbie client-server guy whose world was sybase VB3. As TFA states, there were a number of older folks, some who had been working there since before I was born, counting down the days till retirement.
I was writing the front end to the banking system, first as a VB3 app and then as a web app (in 1996!). As such, you'd run "jobs", basically like how you'd call a stored procedure, and get back the value. So I'd run the job, and before I had taken my finger off the enter key, the result was sitting on the screen.
I asked a "little-old-lady" who was days from retirement how it cached the person's value, and how it took into consideration interest, atms, etc. She told me it didn't. It started from the top of the vsam file, and added and substracted for that person till it got to the end. Then it gave you the answer.
It did this every single time.
I have never ever ever seen anything that could match that machine for raw IO processing. Add to it the fact that it was used by several thousand people all over the world, *and* it ran VM so there were two identical MVS operating systems, then CICS, then the apps....
To be honest, I never got the hang of how to even move around in CICS, but I will give mainframes a lot of credit...when you need to shovel a *lot* of data around, there's probably nothing better.
The fact is people...mainframes are computers answer to gravity...you never see them, barely acknowledge their presence, but you'll miss them when they're gone, because they're the only machines that can handle the staggering loads that would make a cluster of *anything* weep.
It's been a while since I was a mainframe guy (1977-1995), but IBM has one of the most extensive sets of documentation for their equipment that I've seen for any hardware software. They publish on CD (or did back in the 1990's) - there was too much paper documentation even back then. Absolutely every aspect is documented. Every single error/warning/informational message that any application or OScan issue is documented with explanations and operator actions (if required). Right down to the data structures used by the OS, there was nothing that was left undocumented. You could even pay to get access to the source code.
The documentation and source code are (or were) revenue generating portions of the business. If your company doesn't pay for them, they don't get them. In turn, this created some of the most exhaustively complete documentation in the world. It is (was?) a thing of beauty.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
I got out of college in '69. I got my first IBM-mainframe job that year. There was no mainframe-training in college. There shouldnt be. IBM has a huge education program to train people to use their hardware. I must have taken 100 classes in the past few decades relating to IBM-clone-mainframes. I dont worry about all those gray-haired IBM experts retiring. The market will train new souls to do this work. As for me, I hope I make it to retirement - the last 36 years of work has taken a toll on me physically. I had better retire soon - the workplace does not need us dinosaurs anymore.
Just write an emulator.
Check out Hercules.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I think part of the problem is grads setting their sites too high. They come out with a degree, and seem to think they should get senior level work and a high paying job. No, not really. If you have no experience (and a degree isn't experience) you shouldn't expect a high level job. You get a job, you get experience, you move up, maybe at that company, maybe at another.
One thing to help is to get experience while you are in school. Get a job doing something tech related. Maybe it's a basic tech support job that pays $6 an hour to help English majors find the start menu, but it's work experience and it helps. Maybe contribute to some OSS projects as well. You'll find that you can advance even on those campus jobs. Freshman year you are help desk, sneior year you are doing DB develoment for the department's website.
So I think we have some unrealistic expactations from both sides. Many employers think that they should be able to get employees with lots of skills that need no training, and not have to pay for it, but many prospective employees seem to think that a degree should be enough to land them a great job.
Where do you start? Especially when you concider that companies don't like investing in training, because it means they might have to pay you more (and if they don't you'll move companies).
Internships. I make more money than I would ever publically admit to and I blame it all on my college internship. You work for peanuts, or even free, but you gain all that useful on the job experience. Some do it part time and continue to take regular classes, some do it full time for a semester or two. Usually you can earn credits for the work too.
If you are smart and get in the right internship, you can shave 5+ years off your after-college-earning-curve. If you are lucky, you can find the right niche and really exploit it to the hilt.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
complicated it may be, un-sexy it definately is. However those ugly complex mainframes run most of the banking, payroll, finance, and insurance processes in North America. Thats just the industries I know heavily rely on those ugly OS 390/zOS mainframes.
Based on my recent 32-month unemployment stint after 15 years of designing/supporting a variety of airline applications, it seems that one's experience isn't seen as valuable unless it's also experience with the same set of specific tools and business areas that a given company is working with.
General industry experience isn't valuable enough to obtain even an introductory interview, and one mainframe platform doesn't translate to another in an employers eyes even if the languages and core concepts are fairly similar.
There were a few exceptions, but not very many.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.