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

Not a new phenomenon

[ls671]

As early as 2002, I started to half-jokingly tell young co-workers that were asking that they should learn COBOL as a way to insure them a prosperous career. ;-) Back then, most schools were removing or had removed COBOL programming from their course list.

I was half-jokingly telling them that by 2015 they should be earning 150-200K a year as a simple COBOL developer ;-)))

See this article from last year saying basically the same thing :

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/07/231774/cobol-programmer-shortage-starts-to-bite.htm

Note: I am to old to start to learn COBOL, this is stuff for young people... ;-)

Re:Not a new phenomenon

[lgw]

COBOL is an odd beast, with no pointer/references and barely even has the concept of arrays. It makes processing a stream of input records to create a stream of output records, with occasional DB updates along the way, very straightforward. It's fine at text-oriented work and formatting as well (I bet it would work fine to implement an AJAX backend). Anything else, not so much.

MULTIPLY FOO BY BAR GIVING QUX. - Actual math syntax (never used, I expect, but humorous).

Re:Cobol vs. Data Entry

[JPLemme]

And don't forget that in COBOL, not only is all of your data global to your program, in a typical batch cycle all of the data is global to ALL of the programs.

I used to hate discovering that field XYZ was being modified in jobs that were completely unrelated to XYZ, because the programmer was too lazy to check the appropriate code out of the repository. "Why bother? I can make the change right here and it'll work just fine!"

My favorite line was "Being on a COBOL dev team is like living in a dorm."

The modern mainframe - Who cares about COBOL?

[Ken Hall]

I went from UNIX in the late 1970's to mainframe zOS (MVS/OS) to VM and Linux on the mainframe. Anything you can do on an Intel box (or a room full of them), you can do on a mainframe, cheaper and more reliably, once you get past the first big financial hit. I've seen the so-called cost studies that supposedly show the room full of Intel white boxes are cheaper. Once you factor in the "unseen" costs, like the article says, and get past the startup, the mainframe looks VERY good.

Current mainframes aren't what people remember from the past. They're (physically) small, agile, and well suited to certain workloads (can you do 256 concurrent DMA transfers on an Intel box?). The problem is, the only companies that seem to be able to justify them for new workloads are ones that already have them for legacy work. IBM hasn't shown much interest in the low-end of the market (sell small boxen, then discontinue them, push licensed emulation, then kill it, etc).

Our biggest problem is finding people who know the technologies. I give classes to our Linux SA's on this, and they're usually surprised at what the current zSeries boxes can do.

Don't misunderstand, there are plenty of applications where Intel boxes make sense, I work both sides of the fence. I just hate to see mainframes maligned as "obsolete" by people who don't understand what they are now.