Retired Mainframe Pros Lured Back Into Workforce

itwbennett writes "Businesses that cut experienced mainframe administrators in an effort to cut costs inadvertently created a skills shortage that is coming back to bite them. Chris O'Malley, CA's mainframe business executive VP, says that mainframe workers were let go because 'it had no immediate effect and the organizations didn't expect to keep mainframes around.' But businesses have kept mainframes around and now they are struggling to find engineers. Prycroft Six managing director Greg Price, a mainframe veteran of some 45 years, put it this way: 'Mainframes are expensive, ergo businesses want to go to cheaper platforms, but [those platforms] have a lot of packaged overheads. If you do a total cost of ownership, the mainframe comes out cheaper, but since the costs of a mainframe are immediately obvious, it is hard to get it past the bean-counters of an organization.'"

Comments

Re:I wonder...

[John Hasler]

"Sam? Sam, this is Frank, CIO back at Engulf and Devour. How is the transition away from the mainframe going? Well, listen. That's what I'm calling about. Yes, yes, I know you're retired, but the cloud isn't working out quite as we'd planned, what with the economy and all, and the kids are having a bit of trouble keeping ol' Betsy going. Yes, I did read that memo you wrote, and it turns out you had some good points. Listen, would you be up for a bit of consulting? Say, $100/hr, 100 hours minimum? Oh. That much? And a car and driver? Well, I'm afraid my budget won't quite stretch that far...No! Please don't hang up! Let me talk to the CEO and get back to you, ok? Please?"

Re:Not a new phenomenon

[ls671]

> Why would you higher a "Cobol" coder to program Cobol

Because most "web programmers" we know of do not know how to spell. Our COBOL programming interface (terminal based) doesn't have auto-completion or auto-correction features so misspelled words cause errors only when the programmer hits the compile key.

Compiler errors are cryptic and it takes a lot of time to find and fix the misspellings. So even if the logic of the code was flawless (for which we also have doubts), simple spelling errors cost us too much money thus making HIRING web developers a non viable alternative for us.