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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.
But to run the latest mainframes, IBM and its customers need a few thousand youngsters to replenish the ranks.
At this sentence, my first thought was that if IBM wants to make sure there are people to support/run/develop on their mainframes, then why don't they start providing more training? If the colleges won't do it, then they need to take matters into their own hands. And then I came across this sentence:
Companies are taking matters into their own hands. Whitaker learned her trade at age 18, through an intensive six-month training course sponsored by Total System Services, her future employer.
Which is great, but I still think that it should be IBM doing the training. If they want to make sure that companies keep buying their mainframes, then they should make sure that there are trained people out there that can go work for a company that is buying a mainframe. It seems completely in their best interest to provide the training at a reasonable cost to get those few thousand youngsters into the ranks.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
Computer Science programs dont teach nearly any applied operating system management. Not that it nessecarily belongs in a Comp-sci program, but if most comp-sci grads cant even navigate linux with any competancy, then why should we be looking universities to fix this?
My issues with comp-sci programs aside, why cant these younger people simply take the normal approach of learning on the job? Dont worry about it, just start training people.
.
Don't worry, this is Unix system. I know this.
Getting a computer science degree isn't about understanding every technology that's been built out there. It's about understanding the principles, theories and practices that apply broadly across the field.
Every other employer I've known with what might be called "specialized" or "exotic" hardware or equipment (and yes, mainframes deserve to be in that category very soon if they aren't already) provided training on that equipment. A sharp student with a good understanding of fundamentals will be able to learn the specifics quickly enough.
Is this anything like the frightening shortage of Cobol programmers? 'Cause I think business should demand more Cobol in the CS curriculum too.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The lack of zOS training on CompSci courses shouldn't make the slightest difference. Companies could easily hire graduates and train them to the ideosyncracies of their mainframes. Any computer science course that produces people who are only capable of using Unix/Windows and so inflexible that they can't cope with change isn't worthy of the name.
That isn't to say there aren't a lot about.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
When was the last time you saw lots of jobs for mainframe techs? The jobs that are out there are filled.
CS degrees should be about Computer Science theory and understanding. The rest is just syntax and training.
The skills they DO teach are the ones that they are most likely going to use in the "real world" at that time. Aside from giving a student a well-rounded education, colleges are also responsible for giving the student skills that will apply once they enter the workforce.
''Some of us started dying," said Robert Stanley, 56, director of research for Air Traffic Software Architectures Inc. in Ottawa. ''Heart attacks and the like. Thirty years of Twinkie-eating."
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
After all, there's no such thing as digital. Just as all the old analog dinosaurs were retiring the high-speed digital crowd discovered that maybe everything wasn't all ones and zeros.
Same applies to mainframes: mainframe technology has been dissed as obsolete for decades. Just as the microprocessors that (mostly) displaced them finally get to where they can use some of that "ancient" mainframe technology, the people who know how to apply it are leaving.
I'm sure a few will be willing to stay on the job if they're asked nicely enough.
Karma is a bitch -- especially the "comes around" part.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Absent is importance placed on "capable of learning", "able to take on new responsibilities", or even just general intelligence.
It's amazingly short sighted. Technology changes, and within almost any company, there's regular change. Hiring overall good people who can adapt and learn new systems ought to be the mindset, but usually it isn't.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Simple supply and demand, once there's a demand there'll be a supply. There might be a period of time where people are short handed but I'd say it'd amount to a blip on the radar
Keep in mind, this is everything for us... and most of us don't even know it.
When you go to the dr's office, guess what's running your insurance data (usually....) ibm.
A friend's dad is 1.6 yrs from retirement and one of the last of the people in his area that run the zOS machines. It is scarry. Truely scarry.
I can talk some hardware with this guy, and a little bit of "good comptuing practices" sort of stuff, but I can't touch him for his knowledge of the workings of the code and systems. And *forget* finding those little "google:howto+topic" miracles like I do daily for my linux admin stuff.
I'm sure most linux savvy ops who know a little about databases could fill in, but there's going to be some issues in the next 5 years or so.
It reminds me of the Cobol joke... about the bloke who earned so much money fixing peoples cobol systems to make the y2k switch that he was able to buy himself a deep freeze. Only to have the 9999 bug crop up. They unfreeze him, tell him all kind of good stuff that's gone on in the world, and then mention to him that since he had Cobol on his resume he was drafted to rewrite some code by the community. (hehe...)
-=fshalor
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.
Comp Sci students are not (or should not be) training to be system administrators. That is a vocational program. That would be like complaining that electrical engineers are no longer taught how to manufacture and assemble vacuum tubes. Serisouly, why complain that students are not being taught long obsolete technology?
Not only that, but the point of a college education (and sadly this is rarely the case) to imbue the students with the skills to think critically, reason effectively and adapt/synthesize information to deal with new challenges. If they walk into a job that requires mainframe skills, they should be able to pick them up as they go. That is, if they have received a quality college education. Other than that, they should be looking to hire DeVry or ITT graduates that have been trained in the vocation of mainframe operations/maintenance/programming/whatever.
Yep. To put it in perspective, most of the mainframe people where I work came here from NASA after the Apollo program shut down.
No, I'm not one of them. At 36 I was a kid when most of them came to work here.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
I work with mainframes myself and I can whole heartedly agree with TFA.
:)
Mainframes may not be the fastest growing area in IT, but they will be around for decades to come.
Remember: All your savings and all your bank debts only exist on mainframes. They control your reality.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
One of the problems is that many computer science programs don't include mainframes in their curricula anymore.
How many of the current mainframe gurus were taught mainframes as part of a curricula? I would expect not very many. In fact, most of the mainframe guru's I have met didn't even have an educational background in computers- computer science as a seperate course of study hadn't barely begun to get off the ground at that point, so they were mostly engineers, scientists and mathematicians who happened to get to work with mainfraimes as part of thier job or studies, and discovered they liked it.
Schools should not be teaching mainframes, nor should they be teaching MS Windows. They should be teaching CS fundamentals, and providing general-purpose software development experiance. I wasn't an expert in embedded software or Windows programming when I graduated college, having most of my programming experience on unix boxes. But that is what I am doing now, because a company hired me on as an intern and gave me the opportunity to gain experience in the field.
The problem is not with the schools but with the employers who were too short sighted to apprentice anyone under thier gurus.
hmm.
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.
No, but a lot of universities had classes in various mainframe-type things, "data processing" and the like. z/OS is just an extension of the systems they've been running for decades, renamed to look "cool." So you probably wouldn't have found, say, a System/390 class specifically at a college, but you would have found a lot of data processing and COBOL classes that would have prepared you to work in that environment.
the college I went to (mid-90's) was phasing those out and bringing in VB and Netware classes. Personally, I think the mainframe-oriented classes were a lot better preparation to work in the IT/IS field than learning how to add and delete users and write "Hello World" with a mouse and a GUI editor.
Actually there are some at the university i study at, as optional subjects, called " zSeries(S/390) operating systems", "zSeries(S/390) architecture and assembler programming" etc...
-- someone from Europe...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Well you paycheck will be late this month due to one of our critical support programmers being put in a home by his anonymous coward daughter.
It's just the payback for the closed source mindset: Mainframes are the biggest players of the secret info game: Pay me $10K and I'll tell you the answer, otherwise your payroll system won't work. Since the keepers of the secrets and the insider priests are dying off, so is the religion they use to control their customers. Meanwhile open systems are growing by leaps and bounds - not with the lush riches of a captive paying customer base but at least it will be around for a LONG time and pay enough to earn a living.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is why my school is introducing a mainframe concentration into its CS program within the next two years, and people graduating with that degree are going to be looking at lots of money. Although, as some other posters have asked, why is this the university's job?
My profs came out and told us that people like State Farm and Caterpillar had sat down with our CS people and asked them to provide some sort of mainframe sequence. But any graduate of the CS program should be able to pick up mainframe programming through training. It's just another language, after all. These companies should have seen the writing on the wall and hired graduates 5 years ago and had their current mainframe programmers start training them. Then they'd have workers with 5 years of real-world experience in mainframes. That's infinitely more valuable than a " mainframe concentration" in a CS degree.
These corporations dropped the ball, and now they're looking to universities to pick it up for them. They don't want to have to spend money training anybody. That's all this boils down to.
The obvious maneuver for a mainframe expert:
1. Retire at age 60.
2. Put together a 40-hour training curriculum.
3. Take a course on education and public speaking at your local college.
4. Offer your training services at $300/hr, plus airfare, hotel, and per diem.
5. Work 1 week per month, and make $12,000.
6. (Optional) Set up a hot 19 year old college freshman with an apartment and a car, and bang her once a week until your heart gives out.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Personally, I find the concept of mainframe development rather attractive, as I do any architecture substantially different from what I'm used to. I'd really like to get to know how to use and program these machines.
Problem is, I've no idea how to go about this. It wasn't offered as a module at university, and I don't exactly have one lying around I can play with.
I recall reading about how IBM donated a mainframe to an english university (reading? Can't remember) for tuition purposes, but I don't exactly want to take a second degree to go about this.
One thing that strikes me is that backward compatibility on mainframes is legendary (with many programs written for a system 360 still running without modification. This would suggest the use of old machines for training. Would there be any objection to companies donating their retired mainframes to academic institutions for this purpose?
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
Mainframe computers are designed around a specific purpose: large volumes of repetetive transactions. This is why they are very prevalent in the banking, credit card, and other financial arenas. They handle the bill processing, customer database, etc.
Sure, you could attempt to blame companies like Microsoft for this, and you would only be partially right. If you do that, you have to add Intel, AMD, Sun, HP, and a whole host of other companies to the mix too, since they all contribute to the "smaller, faster computers are where it's at" attitude. A big reason why this attitude prevails, however, has to do with the "single point-of-failure" issue. When your mainframe crashes, you can do absolutely nothing until the necessary repair work is done. This is where the distributed computing environment works very well.
Having worked on mainframes in the early part of my career, I know that they were useful then, and still are. They excel at what they were designed to do... large volumes of repetetive transactions.
It wouldn't hurt for computer science students to learn about mainframes, or even limited resource embedded systems. It would make them better, more well-rounded IT folk.
OCO is Loco
LOL, its not that I can't get a job programming. Cobol isn't the only language I know, I can do 5 or 6 (no web languages though) Its that I have people do that for me now... :) More money in Management and Admin. Why hack code for 3ok or 40k, when you can make double talling other people what to do?
Anybody that takes Cobol in school is probably a CS student, and most CS students learn multiple computer languages through out their schooling. I didn't think I needed to explain that bit.
The one that I like best involved backing up to tape. Apparently tape backup started not as tape, but as thin steel ribbon. This was some heavy stuff, so they employed 3-5 horsepower motors to spin it. Of course, if the motors weren't calibrated right, the steel tape would often snap. One guy even lost his arm to this tape.
How's that for nuts? Computer maintainers don't get these kind of injuries anymore I'd assume. What with steel tape being phased out.
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.
There were several reasons for this. One was that during IBM's "dark days" in the early 1990's all the young people took the severance packages and fled the mainframe groups. They knew they could learn other technologies and the packages were too good to resist. The older people stuck with what the knew. Then as IBM slowly recovered the recovery didn't focus on mainframe technologies, so new people didn't get hired into those groups. When they finally realized that they did need to hire new people it had been nearly a decade since those old people had trained anybody and they really didn't know how to do it.
I came in with a CS degree from Stanford and was told by one manager that if I worked in his group I would spend two years debugging other people's code. That wasn't attractive to me at all. Bright people want to go somewhere where they can have an impact, but the older guys saw us as a threat and were very reticent to teach us anything. All four of the people I was hired with left for different either different groups in IBM or other companies. The mainframe world couldn't compete with the glamour of the internet boom.
Honestly, I spent four months trying my best to learn this stuff but nobody wanted to teach me. I could see that it was going nowhere. There is going to have to be a real culture change if a hand-off of this stuff is going to happen.
Lasers Controlled Games!
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!
Where I work we have a relatively young staff because only about 1/2 will retire in the next 10 years. At 33 years old, I'm the youngest by about 10 years. One of my co-workers told me that I'll be chained to my desk when I'm as old as she is but those chains will probably be made of gold. Whenever any vendor or customer comes on site the first thing they say is "I never see anyone your age doing mainframe work."
It is a pitty because given a fair chance I bet people would like being an admin once they got past the initial learning curve. The monitoring and automation tools are nothing short of incredible. I can tell what each program is waiting on, what data it is reading, who has higher priority, how long it has been running, how much IO it has done, and lots of other things. I can even alter the memory of the program as it is running (although I'm too chicken to do it). I can also go back in time and get this information from days ago so when I get the "it was slow yesterday" problem I can easily investigate.
I didn't learn a thing from college regarding the mainframe. College was for general logic, problem solving, and overall data structure. Everything I learned was on the job training. When I started one of the older guys said it takes at least 5 years to make a good systems programmer. Anything less and you have a dangerous person who only thinks they understand what is happening. I would have to agree.
The mainframe is really nice in some areas. It is an ego rush to fix a problem that is keeping a multi-billion doller company from shipping any new products (I did that yesterday) and the people I work with are great because they are always willing to share experience and historical knowledge. When they retire I'll miss them.
The price you pay is that many systems have 30+ years of customization in them. They are incredibly complex and very tailored so no two are exactly alike and as a systems programmer I'm expected to be the "final expert" on any problem the users can't solve. This includes finding out why a program that was written when I was three years old no longer reads a PDS properly or why a job that hasn't changed in 5 years suddenly stopped working. It can be lots of fun but it can be frustrating too especially because the bosses really don't want to hear "I don't know" for an answer and "just reboot" isn't even in their vocabulary.
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.
Everybody knows damn well why IBM doesn't have so many young people pursuing z/OS training.
At one point, IBM mainframes and their work-alikes were almost synonymous with enterprise computing. Today, that is far indeed from being the case. They're still interesting and useful, but part of a specialized niche market.
There are plenty of good reasons to learn mainframe technology, but given that the architecture, operating system, heck... everything! are completely proprietary and the knowledge you accumulate is generally not practical any place else (unlike the Unix world, for instance) there is a strong disincentive to "put your eggs all in one basket" and learn mainframe technology. What if IBM discontinues it in five or ten years. Worse, what if it's gone in 15 or 20 when you're too old and tired to learn new tricks?
I have a deep respect for IBM and its business practices (no really!) But not for the decisions they made surrounding their mainframes. Granted, I can't take potshots because most of this was done thirty or more years ago with no clue as to what the world would like today. Still, building to open standards has always been a sound truth. The more you rely on proprietary tech to lock your customers in -- however you justify it -- the more you ensure that sooner or later you will pay the heavy cost for doing so.
IBM built its own cage here (or, dug its own grave if you feel like being dramatic.)
These kind of articles aren't the result of in-depth reporting, they're spoon-fed to media by people with agendas. You've hit the mark on the motivation for this fluff to get published. I got suckered into getting certified in Novell Networking back in '95 because of nonsense about a lack of qualified people in a growing field. Yes, mainframe technicians tend to be older- but does this fact indicate anything about future job markets- Emphatically, No!
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.
My how times have changed. Back when I was in University, we learned computer science, not specific operating systems. Of course we used specifica operating systems. In our case it was 4BSD and VMS. But we didn't have classes in them. We had classes in programming languages, data structures, compiler design, algorithms, etc. That was just the basics. That's what I took because I wasn't a CS major. The majors took additional specialty classes in information theory, networks, artificial intelligence, etc.
Wordstar, 123 and DOS were on the market back then, but if you wanted to take classes in them you had to go to night school at the junior college. How much of that "education" would be useful today? Why do you think classes in Windows or Linux today will be different and remain be useful twenty years from now? If you really need those classes for your job, then take a night class at a junior college. But don't waste your formal education on them.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Higher education in the programming world will only get you so far. I've done my share of both hiring and programming on both mainframes and minicomputers, and I prefer to hire non-graduates. It makes for less stuff that they have to unlearn so that they can do the job properly.
Grant you most of my experience was writing and managing an RSTS/E and RSX development lab, but CS graduates simply cannot write good batch code, most cannot even imagine a world where the limits are 16k source files, 48k compiled images, overlays and such.
Higher education does well teaching the science of modern programming, however Mainframe programming is an art, and well education does very little for the arts.
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
the ability for companies to teach got decimated by the endless rounds of cost cutting.
/V 286, /V Win, /V PM, /V Mac & VisualWorks and VisualAge) all without ever getting an appraisal from one of these HR 'survivors' because they wouldn't know an object if they tripped over one.
:-)
HR people are supposed to be part of the solution, increasing the talets of the pool with 'on the job' training, but they are part of the problem because they are driving the need to increasingly specific 'skill sets' for entry positions.
Entry no longer means, 'getting in, figuring out which way is up, and fitting in making yourself helpful.'
Entry is now a list of requirements being administered by somebody who doesn't know, or want to know, what a job 'might' entail.
They went through the same cost cutting (some might say 'throat-slitting',) as the rest of the organizatin and the HR positions are now staffed by the survivors, the once eigteen-year-olds who managed to hang on because they didn't cost enough to get rid of.
'Knowing' is now everything and 'being able to figure it out' is now worth nothing because it can't be 'measured scientifically' by people who administer the tests.
I am now an old techie and I am just now getting a bachelor's degree in a non-techie field because I couldn't ever get another job doing what I'm doing right now.
I was into object-orientation and Smalltalk since 1985 (Methods) and I am closing my career in 2005 with VSE (after having worked with
I am also aware of the limitations of objects (without relationships, they aren't enough) but I don't care enough anymore to 'fight' the good fight.
The machines that I've worked on (Wang 2200, IBM 360s, DEC PDP/11s, IBM 370s, Z80, x86s, PowerPCs), the languages I've used (BASICs, Cs, Pascals, ProLOg, Lisps, APL, PL/I, Smalltalk's, PHP), the operating systems I've used (Wang BOSS, RSTS/E, OS/360, CPM, Microsoft pre&post Windows, Mac Linux,), the database systems (VSAM, ISAM, IDMS DB, MDBS III, MySQL, PostGreSQL,) didn't really matter worth a damn.
They were just means to an end. I just kept the 'end in sight' and the solution was as simple as following a line.
After 20 years, I figure I deserve a break.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.
This story is a bunch of alarmist hogwash. They said the same thing about the lack of skilled people when the Y2k Bug was supposed to bring the world down. Yes, some of the people stuck doing Cobol were the ones who built the systems, but others were new recruits who found their way there because of... wow what a revalation -- economic opportunity! Guess what? We live in a capitalist economy (well, sort of), which is extremely adept at moving resources to where they are needed, and creating the right incentives. A few years ago, one would be forgiven for thinking that there wouldn't be enough qualified .NET or Java developers to satiate the demand, and that businesses would come apart for the lack of them. Once again, paychecks proved the magnets they are when they reach a certain point, and suddenly the industry was awash with all the qualified architects it wanted.
I'm a techie bred on Assembler, C++, Java and C#. Give me the right incentives, and I'll even add Cobol to that list!
Everyone else.. have a nice weekend. There are many more pressing things to worry about than mainframes running out of handlers!