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:Cobol vs. Data Entry

[Qzukk]

no worse than C

Except for C having "+" "-" and "=" instead of "MULTIPLY units AND cost GIVING total"

If Perl is the archetypal "write only" language, COBOL is the one true "read only" language.

people are crazy not to get into this field

The whole point of TFA was that entry level jobs where people could "get in" went away, then all the senior staff retired or expired, leaving the companies with nothing.