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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription... is more Cobol!
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.
I think you're taking a fairly simplistic view of current EE teaching in general. I know that in my course, of the 8 subjects offered in first year, only one is purely digital.
I'm in 4th year now. Final semester. And this is the first semester where I can truly say it's all digital; this being the case for the stream I chose (computer systems). The alternative stream is communications (more RF/wireless stuff). This semester is all advanced DSP and CPU design, with digital control theory thrown in too.
It's not like we spend four years learning how to count in binary. But the truth is, there is a lot of demand for digital electronics, and so a lot of the curriculum has replaced the more archaic, "voodo" analog tricks with it.
That said, we still learn all about simple BJT amplifiers, with temperature stabalising modifications and all that jazz, all about their structure at an electron level (having semiconductor experts as lecturers help here), not to mention the oodles of op-amp, transmission line, passive filter theory and labs...
I even had the pleasure of designing, building and testing a microwave signal amplifier that operated at 1GHz, which I would like to think is something worth mentioning considering my stream is supposed to be "computer" specialised.
I'm a little surprised you think there are EEs out there who belive it's all just "1s and 0s"... I don't think there's a serious professional digital electronics designer out there who is that naive..
Anyway, I'm off to do more FPGA work...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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> Everybody else was over 40.
Careful there buddy. Some of us are over 50, and with young kids (I got a late start, how typically geek) are going to be doing this until we're 70.
As you will learn soon enough yourself, over 40 is not the end of the line, as long as you keep learning and keep current. Bah, I had my hands inside the Unix kernel long before Torvalds even graduated from high school....
It is not always the case that older people stick with what they know, it is often the case that corporations shovel money toward people that know what they are doing to keep them around. Commonly referred to as retention programs. As long as you have half a brain, there is no risk in it. By the time the door really does close, you have been earning wages above 'the curve' for ten or fifteen years, and you still have marketable skills. (You did keep learning, right?)
The old guys felt threatend? Weird. All my mentors when I started out of college were 'old' guys, and they were very helpful and very accomodating. But then, part of their performance review was based on their mentoring skills. If I failed, it would have reflected negatively in their pay, so they had a vested interest in my success. All these years later I still respect the time and knowledge they handed over, I learned far more on the job than I did in school. Of course, it was spread over more time, and I did have that nice 'bootstrap' from college.
Since then, I have been in a few mentoring positions myself. Generally they went well, but a couple of times not. One was either a lack of capability or desire, I could not figure out which. The guy had flashes of brilliance but never completed a single project. The other was purely a personality conflict. Young guy, wet behind the ears, got good grades in school, suffered from a 'god complex'. Too bad, because he was smart, but nobody (and I mean nobody) could work with him. It was always 'his way or the highway'. Apparently we were all idiots and the whole company was damn lucky to have picked him up.
Hang in there. Careers over the long haul of thirty or forty years have a way of taking paths that you will never expect. Remember to have fun while you are doing this, but make sure you maximize your pay as well. No use in spending so much of your life on the cheap.
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.